Insert The Original Indestructible Captain Here
by ProperDaveXD001
Summary: Post Jaw Dropping Reveal. Society Agent Dave is having a nightmare, both awake and asleep. Fury and doubt mix into a deadly cocktail that threatens to destroy him. His nemesis has returned, and can see right through him, but not for long...
1. Chapter 1

Hi guys! I'm back! This has been in the works since April, so I'll be glad to get it out there for you all to read. I've been playing with when it's set almost since then, but I suppose it's set at some point a few weeks after "Insert Jaw Dropping Reveal Here".

Okay, Admin time. I own none of the below except my own self-insert and his Pokemon (Her presence is plot relevant, and you'll see why soon enough.). My hat goes off to Gerry Anderson and Century 21 for creating such a fantastic fandom for us all to enjoy. Which is why I won't let a Sue destroy it!

One minor note: the "at" symbol doesn't work here, so taking a leaf from Alice's book, I'm substituting (a).

If you don't know anything about the Anti-Cliche and Mary-Sue Elimination Society, this might not make any sense at all to you, in which case you might wish to google us. Enjoy!

* * *

**Then and Now**

The agent slept, watched by a pair of yellow eyes. Dave tossed and turned as the eyes came cautiously closer to him, noting every bead of sweat on his face. As he dreamt...

_Dave ran down the corridor as the alarm bells rang. How and why were questions that his mind shunted to one side for the time being. The facts were thus:_

_The Sues had broken free from the basement._

_They had overwhelmed those sent to stop them._

_They were heading for the portal control room. _

_Tash was shouting orders to agents with such venom that Dave half expected her to grow fangs and start spitting gobs of green mucus at them. _

"_Drake! Get to the armoury and dish out weapons. Tyler! Prepare your biggest and nastiest explosives. All right everyone..." Tash turned, and Dave was horrified to see her eyes had turned red and feral, like some wild bird's. "...this is it! Earlier than we planned, but in some ways, long overdue!" _

_Dave glanced around at the rest of the society agents. They were standing around with looks approaching feral lust on their faces, and he felt a shiver go down his spine as Tash completed her order. _

"_Kill them all!"_

_The door to the control room opened. It was packed to the stone vaulted roof with Sues and Stus, all trying desperately to get to a door on a stone pedestal some 100 metres away marked "Way Out". They were pushing and shoving each other in panic and doing nothing other than getting in each others way in the Melee. _

_At the sight of the society agents they redoubled their efforts, but Michael led a charge into the thick of them, Claire at his side, and blood flowed wherever they walked. Tom, one of the newer agents, was hacking and slashing away at a nearby Sue with obvious relish, and administered a spectacular Coup de gras that split her from top to bottom. _

"_Exterminate!" he cried, in a voice that sounded more like Nicholas Briggs than his own, "Exterminate! Exterminate!"_

_Aster responded with a peel of demented laughter, flying over the fracas raining icicles indiscriminately. Chrys jumped on one as it went through the top of a Stu's head, causing a mess that is far too graphic to describe in a T rated fic. _

"_We're pushing it as it is..." Dave muttered, failing to notice the lack of fourth wall breaking that would have given him a clue that this wasn't all it seemed._

"_PUSH HARDER!" Screeched Valerie, laying into another Stu, inflicting damage that kept him alive as long as possible, savouring every tortured scream that left his mouth. Ben pinned Lilly against a column, and whispered that she had served her purpose. A Nuke descended, and Dave turned away, horrified._

_There was a scream to his left, and Dave turned. Harriet was standing over Emily, a sword reminiscent of Excalibur in her hands. _

_The way was clear. At least one might survive..._

_Dave was at their side in a matter of picoseconds. His hands found Harriet's wrists, and wrenched her backwards. Harriet staggered, but regained her balance quickly. A sudden silence fell. It seemed everyone had witnessed this. _

"_Traitor, Traitor." The chant was taken up by those next to Harriet, until they were all closing in around him. This was a good moment to discover that there was a door behind him, and sure enough, there was! _

_Closing and locking it behind him, Dave found himself in a new corridor. _

"_Why...?" said a vague and insubstantial voice. _

_The door began to splinter and crack under the agent's assault. Dave ran, throwing panicked glances over his shoulder, until he found another door. _

_A smothering red sky was cast over his head like a blanket. He was in a familiar car park. Where was this hotel exactly, Nether Wallop? It didn't really matter, as Mary-Ann Twilight stood before him._

"_You're not real..."_

"_Am I?" She snarled, launching herself forwards, hoisting him off the ground by the neck. "Is that why you authors pester us? Because we're not real? Because we don't feel things, so you can just murder us willy-nilly if we don't meet your perverted ideas of perfection?"_

"_Red...Intimidation... tactics..." Dave gasped, "No power... in real world..." Something was wrong. _This shouldn't be me! This didn't happen like this! _He thought. _

"_This world is real to you, but our world is real to us. We can really hurt, bleed, die. You started this war!We won't let you destroy us!"_

_She gasped and fell forwards as Tash's sword emerged from her chest. Dave backed away as his friend threw the corpse away with an air of weary disdain, and found a car behind him. When had Mary-Ann let him go?_

"_Why...?" The voice persisted. _

_Driving now. Towards a shaft of red light, emanating from Stonehenge. Driving the car. _

_A shower of silver meteors slammed into the landscape around him, forcing Dave to swerve violently around on the road. He rounded a corner..._

"_Why did you abandon us?" Came the voice again._

"_I didn't I- AAAAAHHHH!" The blue side of an Argos delivery lorry loomed out of the otherwise black scenery. _

_Five seconds to impact..._

_Four..._

_Three... The air-bag detonated in his face. A pair of Yellow eyes came towards him like oncoming headlights. _

**GAAAAAAAAGHH!**

The eyes jumped back out of range as Dave sat up in bed. It took him a second of paralysed staring to realise that they belonged to his Luxray.

When Dave had first started playing Pokemon Platinum, he had Evangelion on his mind for some reason, and had somehow decided that a good name for a male Shinx would be Shinji. So when he had ended up with a female one, he hadn't thought much beyond "Hmmm, Shinji=male, female=Asuka", completely forgetting that Rei would be a good name for a female Luxray. Fortunately, she did not take after her namesake in temperament, and was in fact quite motherly in her concern.

Asuka tried to approach again, but whatever Dave had dreamt of had exhausted him to the point that he fell back onto his bed, utterly sparked out. Ignoring the author's bad (and unintentional, honest guv!) pun, the electric Pokemon tucked him in as best she could.

"Knock it off, Aster! It's two in the morning!" came Adrian's voice from far off, as the fourth wall shook.

Asuka was tempted to lay down next to him, but given that she still smelt of Full Restore and charred fur from a recent battle with Tash's Typhlosion, she decided this would be far from comforting, and curled up on the rug in the middle of the room.

_That's the third night in a row he's had nightmares. _She thought to herself._ He'll never talk about it, if he even remembers, so I guess _I'll _have to try and get Valerie to take a look at him. Problem is, I don't know if her empathy works on Pokemon..._

Casting a final look at her sleeping trainer, the Luxray settled down to get some sleep herself. She'd worry about the language barrier in the morning.

**oooo**

The man sat a console; a sheet of paper, connected to a broadcasting array of fantastic complexity in front of him. He took his hand from where it had rested on the paper and closed his eyes. The psychic shock was getting worse every time he did this, but on the positive side, it looked like being the last time he would have to.

A plothole opened behind him, and two women stepped out, carrying shoulder bags full of small test tubes and nursing several small injuries, already mostly healed.

"Another successful mission ladies?" He called out, shadows dropping over his face as he did so, hiding it from view. Mesha Alicia Maria Susan Maylene Violet Abigail Yana brushed her long purple hair out of her eyes before she answered.

"Yep." she replied. "We've got everything you wanted on that shopping list of yours."

Her companion held a tube up to the light. A single hair, as red as her own, glinted inside it. "She was a difficult one to get. Almost blasted me across the horizon!"

The man frowned. "I hope you wiped her memories afterwards Romani. The last thing we want at this stage is the society realising that something is up."

"We're perfect, remember?" Mesha replied, "Of course we remembered!" The man sighed, as Romani glowered behind Mesha's back. This was the downside of working with Mary-Sues...

"Fine then. Mesha, get to work on setting up for Phase Three. Romani, I need you to do a little play acting for me... Yes captain? What is it?"

A man wearing a black uniform with the Anti Cliché and Mary Sue Elimination Society logo in full view on the front stood at the door, looking vacant. He opened his mouth and stood like that for a few seconds before speaking, as if he was struggling to remember why he had come in.

"Another one." he said simply.

"How many is that now?"

Again, the pause before speaking, as if thinking was something that needed to be done in its own space. "Ten."

"Excellent! That's enough. Give me your Prohibitor detector glove and report to your station."

The soldier paused, only now registering the fact that he was wearing an orange glove with a small view-screen attached to the wrist area. Then he took it off, presented it to the man in the shadows and left.

"As I was saying..." The man went on, "Phase Two is now in your hands Romani. So listen carefully..."

**oooo**

**The Next Day...**

Dave crouched low in the tunnel. A group of Sues had broken parole, gone on the run, and three of them had appeared here only a few minutes ago. He, Drake and Ingrid had been sent in after them. He wasn't even sure which fandom they were in, or even how dangerous they were. And he was half asleep to boot...

They weren't so dangerous to look at. Two blonde twins, huddled pathetically in a corner of the three-way tunnel intersection, trying to keep warm. A red haired woman in a white dress pacing nervously back and forth, and a girl in her early teens, with strange purple-black coloured hair that looked like the deepest Twilight.

It was the red-head that no-one could explain. She had come from seemingly nowhere and coerced the Sues to follow her into plotholes. It seemed that ten others, once presented with an opportunity to return to their old ways, had jumped at it with both feet.

At least that was what appeared to have happened...

Dave was reminded of Mesha, his first arrest. She had seemed to be co-operative and pleasant, and his instincts had told him to give her the benefit of the doubt. She was now at large again, and more powerful than before, thankfully none the wiser for her espionage mission in the library. A triumph of hope and naivety over experience.

Despite this, Dave's instincts now told him that something didn't feel quite right about the woman, and he couldn't help but agree...

Rhia's abduction and staged death had highlighted the fact that things were not always as they seemed.

He moved in for a closer look, and dislodged a small stone. The Red-haired woman reacted instantly, drawing a gun and pointing it down the tunnel at the agent. The rest jumped, and tried to get behind her, as if for protection.

"STAY THERE!" she shouted, "or I'll..." She abruptly realised she had already fired the gun as she jumped. Dave examined the chip of stone that the bullet had broken off not far from his head, and decided that, on balance, he had better do just that.

_Would a perfect being like a Mary-Sue start like that? _He thought._ Mesha did, but her powers were absent at the time...Still, task at hand._

"No worries..." he said, aiming for an unflappable tone, and missing by a mile. "...I'm comfortable where I am..."

"Don'tletimgetus, Don'tletimgetus, Don'tletimgetus." One of the twins mumbled.

"Don't play funny man with me!" the woman responded. "I won't let you take them back to that dungeon of yours!"

"Back?" Dave replied, sticking half of his head out from behind the rock wall. "They weren't in there to begin with! Wasn't that the point of them choosing parole?" Dave's left eye was quite short-sighted, and the view he had of the red-haired woman was blurred. He wished he had brought his glasses with him, even if there was the risk they'd be damaged.

"You've got guts at least." The dark-haired girl put in, starting forward. "Are the three of us "desperate criminals" too much for those faceless mooks in black to deal with?"

"Alira..." the woman muttered, as the twins continued to sob into each other's shoulders. "Stay back..."

"There's only one of him! Lets get him before the rest of his execution squad catches up!"

"Wha..." Dave realised he was losing the initiative, and decided to take a calculated risk. He stood up and came out into full view.

"Okay. First question; Who are you? Second question; Why should we consider you desperate criminals?" He was standing as straight up as the tunnel would allow, waving his arms around for effect. The woman almost fired, but since she could see he wasn't holding a weapon, she held off. "Thirdly; What do you mean execution squad? Fourth; If you're perfect Mary-Sues, then why are you starting and panicking like this? Fifth; Why am I standing here doing a spiel worthy of the Doctor?"

It was fair to say that he had got in firmly under their guard. Alira and the woman with the gun just stood there gaping, one of the twins actually laughed uncertainly.

"A question I think we all want the answer to is; What in the world is going on here?" Dave finished, slightly surprised with himself.

Alira's eyes narrowed slightly. She clearly wasn't sure whether to trust him or not. The woman with the gun lowered it slightly, but still kept him covered all the same.

"I don't remember you from that fortress..." she said, quietly.

"Explain..." Dave was intrigued now. Fortress might mean, space-ship. If the PCMSPS were still around, that could be trouble...

A light flared in the corner of his left eye, and a small grey object fell to earth close to Alira's foot. She opened her mouth in the beginnings of a scream.

"Trea..."

The world went white.

**oooo**

"We can account for three of them, but the gun woman got away." Ingrid reported. Dave suddenly became aware of where he was, sat up sharply, and was rewarded with a short burst of dancing penguins before he regained conciousness for the second time.

"Welcome back." Michael said, standing over him. They were still in the portal room. Valerie, Michael and Aimee stood next to were he was lying, and Ingrid and Drake were carrying several ominous looking bags away from where the portal materialised.

Body Bags. Three of them.

White-hot fury gripped him, making Val jump. He stood, willing himself to disregard the thumping pain in his head.

"Umm... Dave?" Valerie queried. Dave took several steps forward, towards where Drake and Ingrid were standing.

"Dave?" Aimee muttered, uncertainly. His axe expanded to its full size as he drew closer. Ingrid looked up from what she was doing. Michael abruptly realised what Dave was doing.

"Drake! Heads..."

CLANG!

Drake's head rang like a bell in his helmet as the back of Dave's axe connected with it.

"YOU PATHETIC, ARMOUR-PLATED NIMROD!"

All activity ceased. Tash hesitantly put her head round a door, recognising the voice, but unable to correlate it with its volume and the sheer fury it carried. Dave was willing himself not to feel the vibrations caused by the impact, despite the fact that his arm was shaking with them, and his face was screwed up with discomfort.

Drake staggered, pulled off his helmet and blinked at Dave, his ears still ringing. "Wha..."

"NO WONDER THEY DIDN'T TRUST ME, IF YOU GO AROUND SLAUGHTERING THEM FOR THE FUN OF IT!"

"Who...Which?" But it was too late. Dave had already turned on his heel and was storming out of another door.

"I didn't join this party to end up being part of a final solution!" The words were less explosive, but were dripping with venom. The slamming door made everyone jump. For an infinite second, no-one spoke. This was seriously out of character for Dave.

Tash was reminded of something Adrian had said, months before...

"_Some people take pressure and frustration and bottle it up inside them until they can't take any more. He's so quiet normally, and from what he wrote on his entrance exam he seems to be very principled... I just can't help but get the feeling that when he does erupt...I hope its a Sue in the firing line and not an agent."_

"What was all that about?" Drake said, finally recovering enough to respond.

**oooo**

Romani staggered into the room, clasping a wound that was staining her white dress red. The man in the shadows reached out and placed his hand on her waist, muttering something as he did so. She sighed as the pain faded away.

"Haaaaaa. That's better...Did it work?"

The man grinned. "He probably burst several ear drums in the library, and the empathic feedback almost had me smashing everything within reach."

"Brilliant!" She replied. "Does that mean we'll finally be rid of Mesha?" The man frowned.

"We needed to keep her on a tight leash Romani, you know as well as I do what she's capable of. This way we've kept her under control, and she's served our purposes as well."

"I know, I just don't like pretending to be a Mary-Sue for her sake..." Romani said, looking down at a thick bracelet on her left wrist sadly.

The man patted her arm. "This will be her last mission for us, one way or another. Don't fret."

**oooo**

Mesha stood on a rocky promontory. Mars was traditionally called the red planet, but due to reasons the author knows nothing of, the rocks were grey. (Probably budget constraints at Century 21, but no matter)

There was no mistaking her destination. A futuristic city on the Martian surface, or at least, what was perceived as futuristic in the late sixties. It was slightly blurred in front of her eyes, giving an impression of the fantastic technologies used to power it. She stood where others had, a few years before, set this fandom in motion.

Captain Black had fired upon the city, mistaking scanning devices for weapon emplacements. The Mysterons had immediately reconstructed it with their power over matter, and took great offence at this. The whole series was a catalogue of their attempts to exact retribution for the attack. Another time, she might have tried to change this event itself, but she had bigger fish to fry.

"Mysterons Hear Me!" She called. Her voice was unaffected by the different composition of the Martian atmosphere. She wasn't even wearing a space-suit! "I come to speak with you."

A device that looked like a ray gun with six barrels turned towards her. Knowing its true nature, she stood her ground as it bathed her with a blue light.

**This is the Voice of the Mysterons. Your outward appearance suggests that you are one of the Earthmen... And yet... Your vestigial second heart, and the fact you stand before us unencumbered by the technologies of Earth marks you out as something more...**

"I was created by Earthmen, farther from here than you can conceive, and yet, I am persecuted by those who envy me. Such is the fate of my kind."

**That is not the concern of the Mysterons! Retribution for the unprovoked attack upon the city that stands before you by the Earthmen is our sole endeavour.**

"Retribution is my goal also. Which is why I propose an alliance between us."

The psychic voice was silent for a moment, as if thinking over her words. Mesha was tempted to apply her powers at this point, but held off. Doing this the hard way would go some way towards mitigating the society's copyrights.

**We guarantee... only to listen...**

Mesha smiled. The society were in for a surprise...

**oooo**

Michael and Tash reached Dave's door. They had given him overnight to calm down, but they were still wary. According to Phoenixia, Dave had run into Emily almost immediately after storming out, which had forced him to cool off pretty quickly. But whatever new gadget she wanted him to field test for her didn't seem to have helped his mood, as a black cloud of self-anger and despondency had appeared over his head as soon as she had left and followed him to his room, where he had remained ever since.

Tash knocked, careful not to knock four times. Reminding him of that wouldn't help...

"Come in."

Dave's room was fairly Spartan, the only poster being a poster of the Mappa Mundi. The man himself was sitting at his desk, a pile of paperwork sat to one side, obviously completed in the intervening time. Beside it, a selection of application forms. Apparently, the job hunting wasn't going well...

"My report." he said, handing it to Michael. He obviously felt awkward, and the two leaders became concious of the grey hairs on his head, although whether these were due to working in the society, or had always been there they didn't know.

"Are you trying to turn this story serious?" Michael asked, "'cause you've got a fight on your hands if you are."

Dave's expression changed as a rumble echoed through the library, followed by a less than delighted exclamation from Adrian. Far from cheering him up, it seemed that Michael's fourth wall breaking had had the opposite effect.

"I don't see how it can be anything but serious." he almost snapped. "And to be honest, it surprises me that you don't see that!"

"Dave, calm down." Tash put in. "If there's a problem, then we can't solve it if we don't know what it is."

Dave sighed. "Sorry, its just that if the society has been fighting Sues for over two years, then..." he paused. "...maybe talking to them is just a little overdue. And it-"

"What makes you think we haven't tried?" Michael interrupted, perhaps sounding more defensive than he intended.

"The fact they think the society motto is "Exterminate, Exter..."" Dave stopped himself, "I Will Not Fall Out With Anyone Else!" he muttered, half to himself. It was a few moments before he spoke again.

"There was more going on than we first suspected. If Drake hadn't thrown his grenade, then those three might have been able to tell us something about it. Its all in my report, but-"

Michael's communicator went off.

"We've found the gun woman." Claire reported. "She's inserted herself into the Captain Scarlet fandom under the name of Captain Burgundy."

"Old or new?" Dave asked, perking up slightly.

"What's the difference?" Tash asked in turn.

"One has 'new' in the title."

Claire apparently overheard this, as she told them that it was the older series. Michael got a word in at this point, and asked her the Sue's level. Dave frowned and opened his mouth to speak.

"Hang on baby, her Suergy is fluctuating a bit. Give me a second..." Claire replied.

Dave closed his mouth again. "Okay, she _is_ a Sue then..."

"Was that ever in doubt?" Michael asked.

"It was in _my_ mind."

"You know the fandom then?" Tash interrupted, before either of her friends did anything they might later regret. Dave nodded.

"Sure you're up to it?"

"I think so. If tunnels are involved, I'll take a hard hat this time."

Michael thought for a moment. Claire had just told him that the Sue couldn't be more than level two, so it was likely to be a successful mission whoever went, and Dave obviously knew the fandom. Perhaps that was what he needed to restore his self-confidence.

"Okay, go bring her in."

Dave stared at him for a moment. "I will take the most appropriate action for the situation. Since I'm not sure what the situation is yet, I'll have to find that out first." He left, leaving Tash and Michael slightly taken aback.

**oooo**

"Is he normally like that?" Michael asked. Tash shook her head.

"No. Well, at least not that I've ever seen." she looked over to the monitoring screen displaying the fandom, where Dave had yet to materialise. "He's quiet, and keeps to himself mostly."

"Come to think of it..." Claire added, turning in her chair. "The only cheep I've heard out of him since... well, Stonehenge, has either been a pun, or a cry for help as Shirley chased him!"

"He wasn't at Stonehenge." said Michael, thoughtfully. Claire and Tash looked at him.

"Wasn't he?" Claire asked, "I suppose I lost track of him..."

Michael thought. In his mind's eye, he was at the hotel in real life. He saw Dave about to get into a car, stop, look at a white road sign bordered in red, and smile the devil's own smile.

"_I've got an idea. I'll meet you at Stonehenge!"_

"He ran off after that, in the opposite direction to us." Michael went on. "Next time I saw him was back in the library." he paused. "He was walking with a limp if I recall..."

Tash frowned. "You didn't query it?"

"I did later. He said he was going to _borrow_ a Tank from a military base to help us out, but he couldn't find one in time."

Claire grinned. "That might have been useful." Michael looked at Tash.

"Well he sounded pretty defensive when he said it, almost the same tone his report is written in..."

"Dave's been under quite a bit of stress recently." Tash replied, sticking up for her friend. "He's been through everything we have in the last year or so, he's had a lot of real-life concerns as well, and I know for a fact he still feels guilty about Mesha."

"Plus he's visibly uncomfortable around Adrian since he got back..." Michael added. "Any ideas why that is?"

Tash shook her head. "Adrian was going to ask, but he hasn't had the chance yet. It's like he's been avoiding us..."

"I noticed that. Maybe he needs to talk to Val." Claire suggested.

"Maybe..." Michael conceded, "I'll ask her to speak to him when he gets back. Assuming of course he ever arrives..."

"Here he is now." Claire said. "Stu readings are... Higher than normal, but acceptable, just..."

"Okay, I've got another question." Tash added, "Where did he get that Land Rover?"

**oooo**

Her name was Martha.

Designed for a Primeval fic Dave had later abandoned as unworkable, she had been in storage for close to two years. A lot of her gadgets had been removed so she didn't stand out as much any more. Only the anomaly mapping database system that was the source of her name remained. The synthesised voice that had come as standard with the Sat-Nav system the device was based on had sounded, to her initial owner that Dave hadn't bothered to create, like Freema Ageyman, alias Martha Jones.

She was a bog-standard long-wheelbase Land Rover. White, with the words "Time Commander" written on the driver's door in blue. Since appearing out of thin air would look suspicious, Dave had elected to use her, but she was currently being annoying.

"Please rejoin the nearest main road."

"Shut up."

Dave felt guilty. He hadn't meant to lose control like he had the day before, and he didn't think he had improved matters by being defensive with Michael and Tash. They had more experience at this, for all they were younger than him, they most likely knew what they were doing.

_Why does it matter that they're younger than me? Am I actually that jealous? _He thought. _Why?_

He sighed. He knew the answer to that one, or to be strictly accurate, answers.

One. Michael and Claire, Tash and Adrian (Living proof of Love stronger than death that one). Dave and... No-one. Okay, so he'd been flirted with before, but he was a real novice at this game, and certainly didn't have the courage to show feelings like that, even if he was head over heels for someone.

Two. Dave had always regarded himself as the responsible adult of the society, which was related to the reason he had joined in the first place. He hadn't done very well from that point of view...

Three. The others were capable of lightening up once in a while, and he took things very seriously. This wasn't so much a problem in itself, but most of his attempts to try and change this state of affairs seemed to have ended up with him in the medical wing, or suspended from the LPGB's copters, and occasionally missing vital organs.

Dave was faintly surprised by the surge of anger that accompanied this thought. Shirley was only doing her job, namely driving out stale clichés. Given that this was part of the society's remit as well meant that he had little cause to be angry with her. So why did he feel like this?

_Well she could be a little less of a bullying little overblown-_

"You are in the Pacific Ocean. Please rejoin the nearest main road."

Dave swiftly came back to reality. He had enough to worry about, what with the fact he now needed glasses to drive, and he had never driven Martha himself before. Then there were the eccentricities of this fandom, created by the fact that the comic strips that appeared in the Century 21 comic were treated as part of the canon, by decree of Gerry Anderson himself, even if the TV episodes never mentioned the events therein. This made it easy for the unwary to be caught off guard.

_I am not unwary. I Am Not Weak! I need to be strong now, more than ever. For all we know those self-appointed-_

Martha juddered, and Dave realised he was trying to change gear with the wrong one of the Land Rover's gear levers. Again, the emotion was beginning to run away with him. _Concentrate on the task at hand! _He thought.

Despite the fact that the only female Spectrum agents in this series were the Angel fighter pilots, the Sue that called herself Captain Burgundy had become Spectrum's best agent in a meteoric rise to prominence that had left the indestructible Captain Scarlet himself by the wayside. She was leading a team of agents into a mine near Craigsville Nevada that was somehow vital to Spectrum's interests in the war against the Mysterons. Mining some kind of Maguffin probably...

"Please turn left in one hundred yards for Algiers."

"Shut up, Martha..."

**oooo**

Michael looked up from Drake and Ingrid's reports on their latest mission. The people in question were seated in his office.

"Right, these are mostly in order, but there is a minor discrepancy that I think we should sort out." he said.

"If it's about Dave," Drake began, "then he's an ungrateful little-"

"It isn't, and I'm dealing with that." Michael put in. Drake snorted.

"Fine, but Dave should remember that I'm the reason he got out of the tunnels with just a bump on the head after that Sue's grenade went off!"

"I thought Dave threw it." Ingrid put in, curiously. Drake looked at her.

"And Dave was under the impression," Michael added, "perhaps brought on by the aforementioned bump on the head, that _**you**_ had thrown it. _**That**_ is why we're here."

Drake blinked. "Well, that explains a lot." he said, slightly mollified. "But I didn't have any grenades with me."

"She couldn't have thrown it either." Ingrid added. "I had my eyes on both her hands. It seemed to come out of the tunnel that Dave was hiding in..."

"It wasn't either of you then." Michael concluded. "Okay, well that sorts part of this out. Thank you."

"But who did throw it?" Drake asked.

"I've got Phoenixia working on that..." Michael began, just as the Ex-hologram breezed into the room, dressed in a Strapless dress that left little of her figure to the imagination. "Speak of the devil..."

"Maybe another time, when Clairey's around..." Phoenixia said, in the most serious voice he had ever heard her use. Then he saw her expression, and the fact that Valerie was with her, and became worried.

**oooo**

"So you're with the U.S.S, Mr...Smith?" Captain Buff asked, slightly suspiciously. He had every reason to be suspicious. Dave was barely concealing his sniggers at the unfortunate man's code name. An eleventh hour promotion from Lieutenant before the comic strip he had appeared in was published had failed to render it any less amusing. Dave pretended to suffer a coughing fit from the dust in the mine workings, and slipped back into the demeanour of a Universal Secret Service agent.

"Sorry about that. Yes Captain, I am." He said, "And I'm sorry to say that I'm here on a matter of utmost delicacy. I have to speak to the ranking officers immediately."

Buff looked at the I.D card, generated by Phoenixia at Dave's request, decided that it was in order, and handed it back to him. "We have orders to maintain a radio silence with Captain Burgundy... But Captain Scarlet and Captain Blue are here somewhere."

"That suits me just fine."

Dave walked behind the Indian agent, through the mine dedicated to Spectrum's Maguffin.

He was led to a ramshackle building that had been commandeered as a Spectrum command post, and introduced to the two men. As he shook hands with Captain Blue, he noted the agent's eyes go slightly unfocused from the copyright he had concealed in his hand. Scarlet instantly seemed to become wary, but Dave had thought of this.

"Oh, I'm sorry. I refilled my landie's brake fluid before I set off. Did I get some on you?" he said, as if mildly embarrassed.

"Don't worry about it." Blue replied, looking at his hand. The sticker had already been absorbed into the character's skin.

Dave cleared his throat, then abruptly turned deathly serious.

"Now we have the pleasantries out of the way gentlemen, I'm afraid I'm here on a very serious matter. Firstly, I must ask you; have you ever had reason to doubt Captain Burgundy?"

Scarlet shook his head, but Blue, now protected by the copyright, looked thoughtful.

"Well, that story about being in deep cover in an underworld criminal cell in Bereznik for the last five years was a bit suspect. None of us had even heard of her! And having been there myself at the time, I'd know!"

"Colonel White confirmed it himself..." Scarlet put in, citing the head of Spectrum's former career as the head of the U.S.S in Britain, but from the tone of his voice, it was apparent that even he could see that the story was a little threadbare.

"That's about what I thought." Dave put in. "You might want to sit down Captain Scarlet." He added, surreptitiously applying his second copyright to Scarlet's arm as he gestured. "There's only so much I can tell you, but I'm afraid that Captain Burgundy isn't all she appears..."

**oooo**

"No-one in the tunnels threw that grenade!" Michael exclaimed. At Phoenixia's insistence, most of the leaders were present, save for Adrian, who was on a mission in one of the black list fandoms. Drake and Ingrid had been dispatched with instructions to get Dave back into the library by any means.

Phoenixia nodded. "What's more, I went back over the plothole records, and found _**two**_ that weren't ours. One was generated by the Sue as she left, and one much smaller one."

"How small?"

"Grenade sized!"

"Okay," Harriet said, "So, someone throws a grenade through a plothole... why?"

"Well look at us all now." Valerie put in "Chasing each other's tails around, shouting at each other. There's a good reason to begin with, but..."

"But?" said Michael, getting the distinct feeling that he wouldn't like the answer.

"Have any of you had nightmares in the last few days?" Val asked. Tash frowned.

"One or two. I wouldn't call them nightmares, but they were more vivid than normal. Can't really remember them though..."

Val sighed, as if she had hoped Tash would answer differently. "Well you're the twelfth person to say something like that today, me included. But the thing that really put me on the trail was Dave's Luxray when she came to see me yesterday. As far as I can tell from her, Dave has had seriously bad dreams in the last few days, during which he has apparently muttered variants on the theme of "I am not a traitor"."

"So... He's dreaming about the Sues torturing him?" Harriet speculated. Val shook her head.

"Possible, but I don't think so." she said. "Consider this as a possibility. Dave is very principled, we know this for a fact. Now, if he's been having nightmares similar to the ones I can remember bits of, then what he is seeing is the Society deciding to massacre all the Sues and Stus in the basement for no apparent reason other than extreme blood lust."

The healer shuddered at this, then went on. "Dave sees this as wrong and -This bit is speculation- tries to stand up for them, to reign us in."

"At which point we all turn on him and start accusing him of treachery." Harriet finished. There was a moment of silence.

"I guess that explains why he was so wary and defensive with us." Michael said to Tash. "If he thought we were going to turn on him at any moment..."

"Hang on." Harriet put in, "If we've been having these nightmares as well, why haven't we been affected?"

"Because we're not the targets." Phoenixia said darkly. "Think about it. Dave has dream, dream seems to come true in front of him the very next day."

There was a short pause as the Society leaders digested the consequences of that statement.

"You mean he's been set up!" Tash squeaked, a split second behind Harriet's far from lady-like exclamation.

"What's more," Phoenixia added, "Whatever intelligence is trying to set us at each other's throats is using something in the library to do it."

"You mean (a)?" Michael asked. The Ex-hologram shook her head.

"Whatever it is is going out of its way to bypass her." she replied, "There are far easier ways to induce nightmares than the psychic frequency I've detected. The problem I've got is pinning it down to a specific area of the library. I've sent a message to Adrian to that effect, but there's no telling when he'll be able to disengage and respond."

There was a beep from the communicators just as she finished, making everyone jump. Claire's face came up, looking worried. "We have a problem."

"Another one?" Michael groaned, the day was getting worse and worse...

"Something's scrambling the comm system. They're working okay, but whenever I try to reach Dave, all I get is a sort of squeaky noise and the line cuts." Everyone looked at each other in dismay.

"Send someone to fetch him!" Harriet ordered. "He's in danger!"

"Well... We tried that..." Claire said, sheepishly.

**oooo**

Drake stood at the top of the Industrial building and watched the two motorcycles speed by. One was red and was being closely followed by a blue machine-warrior. The other, a police bike, was out in front, closely followed by a blue dragon with masks over it's three faces, and a Dragon that seemed to be patterned after a pair of handcuffs.

The agent scratched his head. As nice as this fandom was, he was sure it wasn't where he was supposed to be... And he knew for a fact Ingrid had come through the plothole with him, so where was she?

**oooo**

Ingrid had appeared in the middle of a crowded street. The traffic on the road nearby was gridlocked, with all the traffic lights in the area having apparently turned red.

As she wondered where Drake was, a trio of minis, one red, one white, and one blue came racing down the pavement towards her. Jumping into a nearby doorway before they knocked her down, she found herself knocking over a small man, apparently of Italian extraction, who proceeded to loudly tell her exactly where to go and how to get there until long after the cars had passed. He was finally intimidated into silence by the sight of her generating a plothole for herself to take her back to the library.

**oooo**

Dave looked curiously at his communicator. Three times now, Claire had appeared on the screen, but it had been a static image, and no amount of shaking it, or saying "Yes?" in a friendly way had prompted the wretched device to do anything more than occasionally beep at him.

He put it away again. If it was going to be that much trouble, he might as well leave it in Martha's glove compartment with Emily's new gadget and his glasses. He didn't anticipate needing it.

**To Be Continued...**

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Okay, that's Chapter one out of the way now. Four more (or so) to go!

Just for the record, I've tried not to offend anyone with this, but if I have got anything wrong, please tell me or I'll never learn.

See you soon!


	2. Chapter 2

Hi guys! Here is chapter two, in response to requests, threats, and cries of "Get on With It!" from you, my fans. Here is where the fic begins to earn its M rating.

Do I need to disclaim every chapter? Well, just in case... I own nothing but my self-insert, the rest of the non-canon stuff is educated guesses. Enjoy!

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What lies below

"So there's no danger from mine gas?" Dave asked, as he and Captain Scarlet walked back to where he had left Martha outside the mine workings. Scarlet shook his head.

"None, but you might want to lose your fleece, it's quite warm down there."

Dave nodded. He had a spare set of clothes that were completely metal-free with him, just in case gas had been an issue. The fact that there was no danger that a stray spark would set off an explosion meant that the gadgets he had would be safe down in the mines as well. Assuming of course that the upgrades Charis had built into the latest generation of the Scene Transitions and Communicators to combat magnetic interference didn't negate this problem to begin with.

As he was already wearing boots and trousers designed for use on building sites, Dave merely removed his University hoodie as Scarlet had suggested. It was this which caught the character's attention.

"You don't sound like you're from Hampshire."

It was a second before Dave remembered that Scarlet had gone to the same University as him, and the W.A.R.G.S of course.

"I'm not, but it was the best for Archaeology and History in the country, so 350 miles wasn't all that far." he replied, throwing it on Martha's passenger seat, "I understand you know the history department yourself."

Scarlet nodded, a nostalgic look coming over him briefly. "How are the W.A.R.G.S doing?" he asked. "Country champions while I was there...Mind you, were they around sixty years ago?"

Dave's hopeful feeling regarding his university society abruptly vanished, to be replaced with a feeling akin to a small man inside his head kicking him and calling an idiot.

His hoodie had "Class of 2010" written on the back, and this fandom was set in the late 2060's.

Oh dear.

Scarlet had one hand on his gun, but seemed to be waiting for him to explain himself. Dave decided to give him a little of the truth.

"Paul..." he said, hoping the use of Scarlet's Christian name would help, "There are factions out there, beyond earth, with a vested interest in Spectrum's conflict with the Mysterons. They could end it tomorrow if they liked, but they could just as easily give those means to the Mysterons as to Spectrum." Dave turned to face the character he regarded as something of a role model.

"So Burgundy is a member of an opposing faction to yours?" Scarlet asked.

"It's not quite that simple, but essentially so." Dave replied, "That's saying too much as it is, but the essence of my organisation is that no-one has the right to play god in matters that aren't their business. Especially not if they then used the power and influence thus gained to cause major nausea for everyone."

At this point, Captain Blue appeared, holding a pair of hard hats with head torches.

"Okay, these should do for you both. Just need to fit them." he noticed the hoodie. "Class of 2010?"

"His grandmother's, apparently." Scarlet said, utterly deadpan.

"She thought it would cause a stir when I enrolled." Dave said, adjusting the head-strap of his helmet as if he had been expecting Scarlet's response, hoping Blue had missed the momentary pause before he answered. To his relief, Blue laughed.

"I'll bet it did!"

Heading for the mine entrance, Scarlet fell back to talk to Dave.

"Am I going to regret that?"

Dave thought for a moment. "I don't like making promises I might not be able to keep..." he said at last.

**oooo**

"That was close!" Claire sighed, having witnessed the near-miss on the monitor. As she spoke, Pete emerged from the plothole, having tried to reach the fandom, dripping wet and covered in something that looked disturbingly like mucus.

"Monster hunter, I think..." he said, by way of explanation. Jared punched the portal console viciously, showering Emily with dislocated wires as she worked on the circuit boards themselves.

"What's up with this thing?" he growled, "We've practically taken it apart already!"

"Ingrid got through to Battalion Wars okay." Chloe said, "so the problem must be with something in the fandom Dave's in."

Chloe and Phoenixia were trying to get a reading on whatever was causing the plotholes to be diverted away from the Captain Scarlet fandom from the scanners, but whatever it was was frustratingly elusive. If the snarky offer of help that had appeared on the monitor a few minutes before was any indication however, (a) had nothing to do with this.

Emily emerged, covered in small scratches from the sharp edges of the circuit boards. "There's nothing wrong here." she said, "And I don't get how anyone could interfere with this unless they had designed this system themselves."

"You don't think a Sue's captured Camille and Doyle do you?" Jared said, his eyes widening.

"I doubt it." Phoenixia put in. "We've upgraded so much since they left they'd be of limited use, so for now that idea stays on the Wild Mass Guessing page."

The fourth wall rumbled. "Kyaaaaa..."

Claire grinned at Aster's response, instinctive despite Adrian's absence. "You know Phoenixia, you are evil!"

"Okay, lets try this..." Emily said, signalling Drake they were ready to try again.

**oooo**

Dave and Captain Scarlet moved through the mine tunnels. Much to Dave's surprise, the workings were recent, but had clearly been worked with pick and shovel, and the occasional Jack-hammer. For a fandom with a steady supply of machinery powered by atomic reactors, the fact that Spectrum was using traditional methods was surprising. Unless...

"Are you mining Luvenium down here by any chance?" he asked. Scarlet stopped and looked at him.

"Do we have any secrets from your people?" he asked in turn.

"That was a guess."

Luvenium. A rare mineral in this fandom, found mostly in Arizona and Australia, that could be refined for use in rocket fuel. A vein here in Nevada, a stone's throw from the Space-port at Glenn field, would be just the Maguffin Spectrum needed to send rockets to Mars, and the Mysterons. The unfortunate thing was, it's presence interfered with the atomic powered machinery used in the fandom, causing it to speed up to the point at which it was barely controllable.

_Blimey, if I'm a self-insert of him,_ Dave thought, _then I'm probably that sad as well. That's more than a little depressing!_

"These are Spectrum issue boots." Scarlet said, pointing out a set of footprints on the tunnel floor. "Burgundy went this way." He paused at a bend. "Well, this is interesting..."

"Problem?" Dave asked, catching up.

"Maybe. We cut all power to the mines before we sent Burgundy down here, so where is that light coming from?" Scarlet pointed down the tunnel. From around another bend a few metres away, a dim glow issued forth.

"She might have confederates down here." Dave replied, lowering his voice. "We'd best be careful..."

"I'm curious to know how we fight beings that can influence minds and probability to gain advantage in battle." Scarlet said, remembering how Dave had explained the Sues to Blue and himself earlier.

"Don't worry about the former, as for the latter..." Dave paused. "Suffice it to say, all I need to do is get close enough to snap one of these on her wrist." He showed off a prohibitor.

Scarlet nodded, and led on with his gun drawn. They rounded the bend, and came to a large shutter door. Light was streaming out from under it. There was a button on the left side that looked like it opened it. Dave pushed it, standing aside just in time to see six pairs of booted feet become visible in the widening gap.

Scarlet cracked off a shot to one set of legs, dropping their owner, and followed up with a second through the abdomen as soon as the unfortunate man dropped into view. He was preparing to do so again, when he noticed that the man, although alive, was making no attempt to stem the bleeding, observing his wounds only with a passing interest, and disregarding his dropped gun completely.

Dave, who had raised his axe, was forced to arrest a high arc swing. All six men were exactly alike, dressed in black military fatigues. The only thing that allowed him to identify them as different people was their weapons, as each was armed with a different weapon from a high technology fandom. It was a second before he was able to notice this however, as he had met them before. They were the same type of cloned shopping mall cleaner from Primeval that Mesha had used against him and Rhia in Bonekickers!

It was then that both men saw what was beyond the six at the door.

The tunnel was slightly wider here, and brightly lit, with the sound of a diesel generator roaring away to itself in a distant alcove. There were several off-shoots of the tunnel in view, and each one was similarly lined, with clones. Arranged along the walls as if part of a strange, subterranean parade that had stood aside for them to pass.

Dave glanced down an off-shoot, and noted the presence of other clones, with far more varied origins than a lowly cleaner, although they were all dressed in black military fatigues. Long red hair here, scaly grey skin there, and several objects that looked like Pokeballs sitting on a bench further on. Suddenly, Scarlet caught his elbow.

"What are these things?" he asked, obviously unsettled. The clones closest to him turned and regarded him with a loose sense of curiosity as he spoke.

"Clones..." Dave said, slightly lost for words. "Thing is, they shouldn't be here...

"Obviously..." Scarlet muttered, "Aren't you going to help your friend?" he added to the clones. They gazed at him, as if they had trouble understanding.

"Their thought processes are a bit limited." Dave quickly explained. "Hang on a mo'... Obey my voice! Take your injured friend for medical attention!"

The effect was immediate. Three clones discarded their weapons and bodily lifted their injured colleague off the ground, carrying him further into the tunnel.

"Why do they recognise you?" Scarlet asked, slightly suspiciously. Dave shrugged.

"Maybe they expected to get orders from whoever turned up next. Can you contact the surface from here?" Scarlet shook his head.

"We're too deep underground."

Dave's communicator was currently sitting in Martha's glove compartment, and apparently non-functional, so he was effectively deaf as well. "Whoever is in charge here must have a way of getting in touch with the surface," he mused as the clones walked away, "and they would probably keep the medical area at a similarly central location..."

"We need to go back and report this to Spectrum."

"No Paul, _you_ do. _My_ instructions..." Dave paused in thought. "...didn't cover this... but it's something my people need to know the specifics of, so I'm going to grab some intel. I can escape myself whenever I need to."

"Be careful." Scarlet replied, backing into the tunnel, covering his own escape with his gun. Dave followed the group as they proceeded onwards.

**Da-Da-Daa, Da-Da-Da-Daaa!**

"Um, what was that noise?" Claire asked, as the fourth wall rumbled.

"Sounded like a Scene Transition from the Fandom." Phoenixia explained. "They usually only kick in when something dramatic or sinister has just happened."

"That bodes well..." Claire replied. Tash suddenly dashed into the room.

"The next one to break a certain wall in the library will rebuild it themselves." She snapped.

"Can't you still open doors to other worlds?" Jared asked, sticking his head above the level of the console. "'Cause I think that's what you're going to have to do for now..."

The communicator console lit up. Emily, who was nearest, scooted her chair over to it, narrowly missing Jared's fingers.

"It's from Adrian." she said.

"On his way back?" Tash asked.

"He says, "Don't worry too much about Dave. He's sensible, and stronger than you'd think. I on the other hand, need the Phoenix Zord sent to my co-ordinates. Now! Phoenixia, you're needed where you are, so stay there for the moment."."

Having stood to go to the Zord herself, Phoenixia sat down again with a slightly disappointed look. She then closed her eyes for a few seconds. "Got them! She's on her way." The sound of moving machinery echoed through the library.

"Where is he?" Claire asked.

"Evangelion, I think..." Emily replied.

"No more Fourth Wall breaking please." Tash added. "He has enough to worry about..."She went to get her gadgets.

**oooo**

Dave could hear voices. Several people were calling for help. He traced them to behind a large round door, which had no apparent means of opening it, save a small sign saying "Push". Dave tried, and failed.

"Hang on." he called, "I'll be with you in a minute." The voices became high and sounded ecstatic with relief.

"You four over there." Dave called to a number of clones. "Push this door open. Obey My Voice!" The addition of Helen Cutter's signature command seemed to be the key to controlling them, as they performed this task immediately.

It was as they did so that Dave noticed that these ones had a facsimile of the society logo on their uniforms. He wondered about this as he entered the room beyond the door, until the contents diverted his attention in the most spectacular manner.

Seven women were bound to upright pillars dotted throughout the room. None were exactly drop-dead gorgeous, but none were completely unremarkable either. It seemed that Dave had found a secret storage facility for the damsel in distress cliché.

"Oh great, its just someone else come to gloat!" One of them spat.

"No we won't turn against our kind, especially not after what you just did!" Another screeched.

"I thought you said we wouldn't be executed if we accepted parole!" another cried out, almost in tears.

Dave was at a loss for a moment, then it clicked. "You're the Sues that broke parole!"

That sentence seemed to act as a stimulant, as all seven started to yell at great length and high volume exactly what they thought of that accusation.

"Those goons of yours abducted us!" One sue roared above the cacophony. "We did what we were told, and you took us to execute us anyway!"

Dave had a sudden, nagging sense of Deja Vu. This sounded very like what the Red headed gun woman had said the previous day. Hang on a minute...

_She_ was the Sue he was tracking here... and now couldn't find...

The little man kicking him in the head and calling him an idiot was back.

Mesha Yana! It had to be her, if the clones were involved. And she apparently had a Sueish confederate, besides her mysterious technician friend.

"Ladies... SHUT UP. Thank you. It seems we've all been deceived..."

"YOU LYING LITTLE SCUM!" One Sue yelled, "YOU'RE JUST HERE TO TAUNT US WHILE THAT THING TICKS DOWN!"

"What thing?" Dave asked, looking in the direction she gestured. "What's going...oh!"

"You are!" said another Sue, facetiously.

**Da-Da-Daa, Da-Da-Da-Daaa!**

"A trap!" Captain Scarlet exclaimed. He had barely returned to the surface, when a pretty girl had literally dropped out of the sky and accosted him, claiming to be Dave's superior. Tash was as surprised as he was, she had been aiming for the mine tunnel...

"Hang on now Ma'am." Blue interrupted, "If you work for the U.S.S, then we need to see your credentials..."

Tash's retort, which was short, vicious and anatomically improbable, was drowned out by the master radio set in the command post crackling into life.

"Agent...Umm... Smith to Spectrum, come in please."

Tash yelped and grabbed the Mic herself, before anyone could react. "Dave. Its Tash, you've been set up! Get out of there!"

"I can't." Dave replied, "My plothole generator won't work. What's more there's a bomb down here, and I don't dare try disarming it, not to mention seven prohibited Sues that are convinced the society left them down here to die, and angry as hell because of it." he paused. "Other than that..."

Scarlet gently eased the Mic from Tash's grasp. "Scarlet here. Can you get back to the pit head? We'll have a welcoming committee ready for your... um... prisoners."

"Roger that, will com..." The radio descended into static. There was a loud snap and a yell from outside.

The command post emptied. Captain Buff was sitting where he had fell, staring at the pit head gear, where a frayed wire rope was dangling listlessly. A pair of identical green rings of light sat almost mockingly on the cable drum of the lift into the mine for an instant, before vanishing as if they had never been.

**Da-Da-Daa, Da-Da-Da-Daaa!**

"Hey, who turned out the lights?" yelled Dave, living up to part of his pen-name. "Clones, Lights please. Obey My Voice!" Every clone that had a torch promptly turned it on, while Dave fumbled for his own head torch on his helmet and switched it on as well. One of the former-Sues, a woman named Joanna, stuck her head out of the prison.

"Whatever that was, the bomb's still ticking." she reported, "And the timer's helpfully glowing a deep red to illustrate that fact..."

Dave knew that she had surrendered to Ossa without a fight a week or so before the Battle of the Library, and had been on parole in one of the Star trek fandoms, but he was slightly suspicious of her apparent willingness to co-operate. And he wasn't the only one...

"Hey, there's still three of your own kind tied up here, you stinking collaborator!" A voice yelled out. This one belonged to an argumentative Sue by the name of Mariana, who had been captured the previous month, and had apparently been waiting for an excuse to strike back at the society ever since. Joanna responded before Dave.

"I'm only interested in surviving, you white-haired tart!" she snapped back. "And whatever's going on, he's our best chance of doing that, so deal with it! And while I'm on the subject..." she added, turning to Dave, " ...If the society is responsible for all of this, then I will personally separate certain pieces of your anatomy from your body, and shove them down your throat."

"Thank you madam." Dave replied, unsure how seriously he should take that remark. "Now if you have any skill with generators at all..." he gestured towards the alcove where the aforementioned device sat, inoperative.

"None." She ducked back into the room. "Gail, didn't you say you wor-"

The generator exploded, with apparently no provocation at all, forcing Dave to take shelter behind the defunct radio set.

Joanna emerged, cautiously. "Never mind..."

**This is the voice of the Mysterons. We know that you can hear us, beings from beyond the Universe.**

Dave jumped away from the radio set, which seemed to momentarily forget that it had no power to run on. The former-sues immediately raced into the room to listen.

**Know that your lives will not be wasted. You will become our instruments of destruction...**

The voice fell silent. Mariana, now freed and mad with rage, took 0.006 seconds to jump to her pre-decided conclusion that Dave was doing this to torture them. She rushed at him, spitting abuse, until she was struck over the head by Joanna. Just as well, because Dave was paralysed by the full ramifications of what he had just heard. The Mysterons were about to apply their retro-metabolism upon the mine and those inside it!

"We're leaving now." he said, remarkably calmly. "Erm... You boy's lead off. Obey my voice!" The clone troopers ignored him.

"Did you hear me? I said-"

"Your orders contradict..." one clone said, slowly.

"Wha...? Then why did you listen before?"

"Our instructions were to wait here... Your orders... did not contradict..."

"Ten minutes and counting..." One sue muttered, nervously.

"Wonderful..." Dave muttered. That left him with a full mile of underground tunnels he barely knew to navigate, in the dark, with seven wary Sues in tow, that could turn on him at any moment, unsupported. Well, most of them seemed to agree with Joanna's appraisal of the situation, but if Mariana was able to panic them, then that would be of little help...

"What's that noise?" The Sue Joanna had identified as Gail asked. Dave listened. There was a juddering roar coming from the tunnels every so often.

**oooo**

"Come on..." Scarlet was hand cranking an ancient diesel engine that drove the ore conveyor. An atomic generator here was useless because of the Luvenium, so the older motor was essential, but it was being stubborn. Unfortunately, this was Dave's only way out of the mine.

"Let me try." Blue said, taking over the handle. Again, the conveyor juddered into life, only to stop a few seconds later. Tash decided she had had enough, and laid a hand on the engine casing.

"Listen you." she said to the engine , in a syrup-sweet seductive tone that no-one trusted. "If you don't get your act together, I will be forced to take you apart, slowly and methodically, until you are a pile of nuts and bolts on the floor, then melt the pile to atoms, and then... No more miss nice girl!"

Blue cranked the handle again, and it roared into life with almost indecent haste.

"Is that possible?" he exclaimed. Scarlet shrugged and grinned.

"Who cares, as long as it works!" he said. "Don't envy the man that marries her!"

Tash's triumphant smirk faded, thinking of Adrian now. Or rather, his recent resurrection.

_We might not always be so lucky._ She thought. _The next fatality could be for good. Why am I thinking this now?_

Tash shook her head to clear it. No sense in being pessimistic...

**oooo**

"Just pretend it's a fairground ride." Joanna said to one of the Former-Sues, bodily lifting the reluctant girl onto the moving ore conveyor.

"Never liked them..." the girl muttered, closing her eyes as the belt carried her along.

"Keep down!" Dave called after her, "There might be a tight squeeze ahead!" The girl obligingly fell flat onto her chest.

"He's going to send us through the rock crusher." Mariana slurred, dazed from repeated blows to the head to shut her up. "They'll kill us all, you'll see..." She swung a punch at Dave from where Gail was supporting her, and both girls crashed to the floor.

"I've got her." Joanna sighed wearily, "You climb on, Gail. We'll follow."

As Gail swung herself onto the belt, agent and Sue somehow managed to get the semi-concious white-haired woman onto the belt in such a way that passing machinery wouldn't amputate anything, then climbed aboard themselves. Dave checked his watch.

"Three minutes and counting..."

"Going to be tight." Joanna muttered from somewhere behind him. "I hope those guys on the surface know what they're doing..."

"Heads." Dave interrupted. Both of them fell prone as the belt passed under another iron brace. Dave's face went into the dust, and he sneezed violently.

"Bless you."

"Thanks..."

"So, if this wasn't the society, and I'm not fully convinced it wasn't, who was it then? Disgruntled author, mad at us for messing up his carefully laid plans?"

"Would you believe another Sue?" Dave asked, rolling over onto his back so he could see her without hurting himself. What he could see of her expression in the head-torch's light answered that question for her.

"Thought not. Why did you accept parole anyway?"

"Because if I didn't put up a fight, I figured you would eventually realise I hadn't done anything wrong and send me back to my Deep Space Nine fic."

"You really think you haven't done anything?" Dave asked, choosing not to remind her that the fic belonged to her author, not her. "It looked to me like you ended the dominion war two years in advance."

"I did what I was written to do." Joanna replied, "Namely, be a member of the Defiant's crew. Doing the job right entailed ensuring the end of the dominion war. I just did it better than my author expected. And because of that, I'm labelled a criminal."

"No-one's calling you a bad person. But-"

"Oh, you think we _are_ people then?" Joanna clearly wanted to believe him, but was a bit cynical. Understandably so, after what she'd just been through.

Dave sighed. He wasn't really in the mood for this. "Look, lets just get out of here first."

Joanna frowned, then looked up. "Watch out!"

A stone clonked the top of Dave's helmet, and he rolled over again to see what was going on. Mariana had stood up, taking advantage of a chamber with a high ceiling, and was somehow keeping her balance on the moving conveyor. That didn't last long, as a metal pole attached to a piece of machinery caught her in the back of the knees and she flipped over it, landing hard on her back. Dave ducked under as he sped past it, and a muffled curse told him Joanna hadn't quite been quick enough. He grabbed Mariana's feet.

"Stay down, you'll hurt yourself!" Her response was to kick him in the face and tell him not to look up her skirt.

Dave sat up into a crouch, and discovered that sneezing through a broken nose was extremely painful. Mariana meanwhile, threw another stone, which soared over Dave's head and struck Joanna between the eyes, knocking her out. She stood up again, eyes unfocused from concussion, and launched herself at Dave.

It was at this point that the conveyor started to incline upwards, the small gap between the two belts opening under her feet as she jumped. Over-balanced, she caught Dave at a bad angle. This was unfortunate for both of them.

**oooo**

"Why is there a gap?" Scarlet asked, as the belt thundered on relentlessly. No sooner had he said it, than a pair of hands came into view at the opening. As Joanna's prone form shot past them, Scarlet and Blue lifted her up and off the belt. Gail saw this from where Tash and Captain Buff were guarding the other former-sues beside the rock crusher.

"But... Mariana was behind me, then..." She stuttered. "I thought Joanna was last..."

Before Tash could properly comprehend this, the ground shook beneath her feet. A great quantity of the ground above the mine tunnels fell inwards, with a slow, inexorable finality.

**oooo**

Dave wondered vaguely why the ground was dancing before his eyes. And why was the world red? Then he remembered.

And then...

...He forgot...

**oooo**

The dust had yet to settle. The green rings made their slow and stately progress over the rubble.

**Miss Yana. The primary objective has been achieved. We will now proceed with the next stage of our plan. **

The rings stopped travelling across the shattered rock, and instead rose up the figure of a man dressed in a uniform like Captain Scarlet's, but as black as the night sky. The slight smile made his deathly pale face look even more disturbing.

**Da-Da-Daa, Da-Da-Da-Daaa!**

Whatever had blocked the plotholes from reaching the Captain Scarlet fandom stopped working when the mine caved in, so within the hour, the surface workings around the spectrum command post echoed to the sound of several society members going about the grim business of extracting their colleague's body from the rubble.

Michael and Captain Scarlet stood on the roof of the command post, looking out over the devastation. The tunnel collapse had caved in a large area of land to the north of the mine workings. Thankfully, no lives had been lost there.

Jared and Chloe were setting up the large scale plothole generator on the edge of the crater left by the collapse. The plan was to transport everything non-canon back to a large room in the library and sort it out there. There was a distinct shortage of volunteers for that duty...

Scarlet observed all this, from a professional, military viewpoint.

"You're not used to this, are you?" he asked.

"Meaning what?" Michael asked.

"Meaning no offence, but you're clearly an amateur group-"

"Amateur!"

"Could you hear me out please? I don't know your... Society... so I could be mistaken, but I was a World Air Force colonel, before I joined Spectrum." Scarlet paused. "Some of the cadets I saw then thought that they were ready for anything just because they'd passed basic training. That's not necessarily true."

"Prepared physically, but not mentally..." Michael said, quietly. Scarlet nodded.

"Pretty much." The Spectrum Agent looked out over the remains of the mine workings. "It was invariably the Cadets I saw boasting to their squad-mates about scores on the firing range that ended up in trouble after their first real engagement."

Michael grinned. "We can cope with most things. You haven't heard the unexpected stuff we get regularly. I'm not giving up on Dave until I see the body, and know for certain that it's him!" He was thinking of Rhia's apparent death. And then Adrian, of course.

Scarlet looked squarely at Michael. "Fine, but don't forget, there are _no_ Guarantees in this job."

"Meaning what exactly?"

"I'm _virtually_ indestructible, and its that virtually that people generally forget. There was no Guarantee that I would wake up after I crashed an SPV into a Jetliner a few years ago. There's no Guarantee that I will recover after any of my severe injuries. You start taking things like that for granted, its all the harder when the miracle you're depending on fails to turn up."

Neither Michael nor the Darkness could think of a suitable answer immediately, and settled for looking down at the group of girls beside the rock crusher. The Sues had been packed off to holding cells until this could be investigated, so the group consisted of Tash, Claire and Valerie.

**oooo**

Tash was numb. Valerie could feel the shock as a tangible entity in her mind. She and Claire stayed silent, letting Tash make the first move.

"I thought... didn't think..." She said at last. Claire understood. She had been thinking the same thing.

They had had their heads in the clouds after Adrian's rebirth, and someone else being killed in action so soon after was the rudest possible awakening. Not unlike the Halloween party the previous year, where celebration had been dashed aside by bad memories and only partially restored by copious amounts of Domino's pizza.

Some people had begun to assume that if another agent was killed in action, then it was going to be one of the veterans, not a comparative new boy. Claire shuddered, as she realised what that implied. She looked up at Michael, who was now speaking to Captain Scarlet with an expression on his face that said clearly, "I respect who you are, and I recognise your authority in this fandom, but I would be most grateful if you shut up now".

Given the fact that Scarlet climbed down soon afterwards, that might have been exactly what he had said. Claire began to wonder whether they were in over their heads...

Valerie's thoughts however were travelling down dark roads. Had they stopped to think about the consequences of bringing Adrian back from the dead? It hadn't exactly been easy, but the procedure had seemed a bit too straight forward... Was this some sort of blood price?

_Life is seldom fair._ Ari put in gently. _There is no cause to speculate upon such things because of its... dubious... sense of humour._

Stacey's voice burst over the Communicators.

"Attention all agents! You have a Sue at your location. Level 5, trying to identify..."

"Don't bother." Came Michael's acid tone over the link, "I can see her..."

The girls looked up at Michael. He was holding his communicator, but looking up at the pit head gear. Following his gaze revealed a woman sitting at the top, with long purple hair, and dressed in clothes of varying shades of light blue. Mesha Yana!

"Helloooooo, all you little society ants down there!" she called. "And welcome to your demise. I hope you like it, I prepared it myself. Well, with a little help..." Dust had adhered to her hair while she leant against the metal but that didn't dull the shine, in fact it seemed to be rich in Iron Pyrite, and glittered in the light, enhancing her natural...

Good lord, I'm going to be sick in a minute!

Tash's reaction was immediate. Spreading her wings, she shot towards the Sue with a look that spoke of bloody vengeance. Mesha's response to this was to lazily draw a sword, and swing it vaguely in the blonde girl's direction. The wave of blue-green magic caught Tash by surprise, and she tumbled through the air as if caught in heavy turbulence. She was able to land, but did so with a considerable bump.

"Owwww! My ankle!"

"Not too shabby is it?" Mesha giggled, standing up and showing off her new weapon. "The ranged abilities of the Howling Sword from the Slayers fandom, and the cutting ability of Excalibur, all rolled up into one tidy package."

Ben and Avak produced their instrument-weapons, but before they could play a note, Lily shrieked and pointed at the crater. Sitting over the rubble was a pair of green rings, side by side. More horrifying still, were the figures standing on top of the pile of rubble. The entire clone army seemed to have survived, or had they?

Captain Scarlet abruptly swayed on his feet, and began to sweat as if in a heavy fever.

**This is the voice of the Mysterons. As agreed with our ally, we shall unleash our new force upon her persecutors, and upon Spectrum in equal measure. Those sent to resist us shall be reborn into our service. Our Agents are invincible. Your only Surrender is death...**

"Just in case there's any mistake..." Mesha giggled. "Now if you'll excuse me, I'd like to get a good seat for little Tashy's battle." She jumped onto the roof of another mine building, and the clones with ranged weapons opened fire.

**oooo**

"Holy ...!" Harriet exclaimed. This wasn't what she had expected at all. She punched a button.

"All agents report for duty!" Her voice thundered through the library. While waiting for the slower or half-asleep agents to reach the portal, Harriet began barking out orders to those already present.

"Aster, Chrys, Akai! Some of the clones on the left look like Animé characters. Deal with them!"

"Right!"

"Gotcha!"

"Kyaaaa..."

"Rhia! Set up a sniper post. Christoph, go with her and cover her!"

"By your command lady Harriet." Christoph replied, Rhia merely nodded. Drake approached at this point.

"That's the Sue that messed with Dave's mind so he hit me?" he asked.

Harriet nodded. "You, Marcus, Pete and Joe, get behind them. Make a few hit and run attacks on their rear." The four agents looked at each other, nodded, and stepped through the plothole.

"Plothole in the library!" Gareth cried, from one of the monitors, "Oh wait, false alarm. Jared and Chloe getting the Large-scale generator to safety. Charis and Emily have it now."

Harriet breathed a sigh of relief. But that reminded her of something just in time...

"Make doubly sure (a) doesn't mess with us now!" She said in Phoenixia's direction.

"Harriet, this is Monica." said a voice on the communicator. "If Terrie, Danielle, Stephen and I leave the basement now, the Sues will be unattended."

"Don't leave them!" Harriet replied, "I'm sending Ingrid, and Kyle to assist." The relevant agents nodded, and left the room. A sue breakout, unlikely as it was, while they were distracted was the last thing they needed.

"Ossa, you, Aimee and Jaime don't bother coming to the portal." Harriet went on. "Go straight to the Medical wing and set it up for maximum efficiency. Val's occupied right now." The communicator registered rumblings of disappointment, but all three acknowledged.

Harriet mopped the sweat from her brow. The last crisis involving the Doctor Who villains could be solved on home territory, but this was different. "How's Adrian doing?"

"If the feedback I'm getting from the Phoenix Zord is anything to go by, he'll be a while yet..." Phoenixia replied. Normally she would have gone with him into a fandom famous for giant robots, but he had insisted she was needed more in the library. A quick check of the monitors confirmed this analysis, so Harriet got on with shouting orders.

"Karrissa, Inara, go to the training rooms and stay with the rookies for the time being. Don't let them blunder about trying to help, they'll only make things worse..."

"What about us?" The Society Leader turned and saw a small group of Agents she had almost forgotten in the confusion.

"Harriet. Dave's our friend." Louise said, firmly. Alice nodded, holding up her power sword aggressively. Harriet noted the use of the present tense.

"We've all got friends out there." Miri reminded them. Gareth tried to say something similar at this point, but was cut off.

"No." All of them looked at Harriet like she had lost her mind. "There might be any number of other Sue problems while this is going on. We will deal with them if that arises, as will Jess, Wille and Tom wherever... No, don't argue Louise! I know for a fact Dave wouldn't want the society to stop working just for revenge for his sake."

There was a short pause. Everyone present was abruptly reminded of why Harriet was the society leader. Needless to say, there were no further arguments.

**Da-Da-Daa, Da-Da-Da-Daaa!**

Rhia squeezed the trigger of her rifle, and a clone abruptly fell to earth, clutching his abdomen. She tracked another target, uncaring of her exposed back. Christoph lay nearby, concealed in a patch of long grass, and ready to deal with anyone who tried to take advantage of her prone position.

She settled on a man holding what she knew from Star Trek: Insurrection to be an Isomagnetic Disintegrator, a nasty looking shoulder mounted cannon, when he suddenly swung his weapon around, as if trying to draw a bead on her. A round through his forehead put a stop to that.

She looked around for another target, and caught a glimpse of a clone taking aim at her with a frighteningly large weapon that seemed to have it's origins in the Halo universe. That glimpse was all she needed to trigger her survival instincts, and she rolled away from the edge of the quarry where she had lain. A second later, the lip of the quarry vanished in a bizarre multi-coloured barrage of Laser, Phaser, and Disruptor fire, showering her in warm smelling earth.

"I'm fine, I'm alive!" she said, drawing attention to that fact so Christoph wouldn't reveal himself unnecessarily. In this case, the lack of reply was a good thing. She lay on her back for a moment, letting the clones think they had killed her.

_I don't remember them being that smart when we met them before. _Rhia thought_. Either they've refined the process, or being restored by the Mysterons has upgraded them. Or both..._

One of Christoph's throwing stars shot into the air, bringing down something purple that struck the ground near Rhia's left hand with a wet slap.

A Zubat? That was what it seemed to be, despite the strange orange blotches on its body, which Rhia took to be a side-effect of the cloning process. Rhia quickly put the cloned Pokemon out of it's misery.

"Umm... Rhia..." came a murmur from close by. Christoph had spotted a large swarm of Zubat flying in from nearby. Flying in amongst them was a Yanmega, which took aim with a Hyper Beam. Every shot or throwing star aimed at it merely hit a Bat-like bodyguard, and Rhia began to look for cover from the attack.

Salvation came in the form of a blast of fire from the main battle ground, scattering the Zubat with its sheer volume, and fouling the bug Pokemon's aim into the bargain. Rhia made a mental note to thank Marcus later, and beat a hasty retreat, closely followed by the unseen Christoph.

**oooo**

Marcus re-focused his attention on the clone troopers, using the Dragon Talisman copy as liberally as he dared without hitting the others. Without armour like Pete, Joe or Drake, he made the most of the scant cover that the rubble offered, while his team-mates engaged the clone army's rear.

Drake suddenly slid behind a piece of rock, not far away.

"Less of them than we thought." he shouted above the noise, "Problem is, it takes a lot to put even one of them down. We only got two of them because Rhia distracted them."

"Right..." Marcus replied. "Were any of the downed clones carrying something like a grenade launcher we can use?"

"No, and I don't think the author is going to make it that easy either."

"Point taken..."

**oooo**

Aster circled above Akai and Chrys, lending aerial support when they needed it, which wasn't often. The Animé clones seemed to mostly minor characters, or faceless goons, so fighting them was easy. Had they known how hard the others were finding it to put down even one clone, they might have noted something suspicious in this, but they didn't.

The trio suddenly found themselves against a rock wall, getting rid of the last few, when a voice rang out.

"Power beyond Twilight and crimson blood that flows..."

Aster whipped around in mid-air, looking for the owner of the voice. On the ground, Chrys and Akai found themselves being pressed against the rock wall by the remaining clones, as those they thought they had slain jumped to their feet and tried to press them further against it.

"Buried in the flow of time is where your power grows..."

Aster found her. A clone of Lina Inverse, star of the Slayers Fandom, in the process of casting one of her most powerful spells.

"I pledge myself to conquer, all the foes who stand..."

Her friends weren't going anywhere, pinned against the cliff-face until the Dragon Slave scoured them from existence.

**Da-Da-Daa, Da-Da-Da-Daaa!**

"You're not fighting us..." Tash said, staring up at Mesha, who was lying down on top of a mine building with a rusted corrugated roof, apparently content just to watch.

"I think you'll have your hands full with him, never mind me." She replied, pointing to a shadow beside another building. A man stood there.

"Wha..." Claire squawked.

Tash brought Nepthys up into an on-guard stance, unable to fully comprehend what she was seeing.

Valerie ignited Seiryu. Their opponent was chillingly familiar, even the Empath was struggling to detect anything that could be identified as different about the former society agent.

Dave merely smiled, the Mysteron rings settling on the wall behind his head like a pair of demented Mickey Mouse ears.

"Hello Ladies..."

**To Be Continued...**

*Shudders* Well, there you are, you asked for it!

Couple of scenes there that I'm not completely happy with, but don't have a clue how to improve. Still, those should work themselves out in the next installments, hopefully...

If I've got anything cataclysmically wrong, do tell me, that's what you're there for after all!


	3. Chapter 3

****

AN: This is the voice of the Author. I own nothing of the Below save for my Self-Insert and his Pokemon... Which I think I've said Before...

Well Guys, now you'll find out why I've included her at all. Read and Enjoy!

**

* * *

**

Reawakening

"You're kidding me..." Louise was pale. Every eye was glued to the monitor showing Tash and the Dave replica.

"Is that...what.." Miri stammered. "Oh dear God..." Her hands flew to her mouth. She was clearly picturing Michael, Claire or Tash ending up like that. Phoenixia put a comforting arm around her.

"I take it something quite dire is occurring?" Everyone turned round.

Aramayis stood at the door, Saito behind him, unaware he had just won the prize for the understatement of the century.

"You could say that..." Harriet growled.

"We leave you alone five minutes..." Saito muttered.

**oooo**

Michael, Scarlet, Chloe and Jared were running as fast as their legs could carry them. The replicated Mariana close on their heels. The Mysterons had apparently deactivated the permanent prohibitor when they had retro-metabolised her. Consequently, she had all the powers she had once possessed in her native X-men fandom. Fortunately, as her Nom de Guerre of Snow-Owl suggested, her powers were based around water and wind, of which there was little available around the ruined mine workings. Being a Sue however, what little there was was being used to frightening effect.

She alighted upon a disused vehicle, chanting an spell to focus her mental energies towards her opponents.

"Don't mess with Nukes!"

Mariana took flight again, and Ben's Nuke devastated only the massive Dumper truck she had been perched upon.

"Gaah! Missed!" Ben shouted, as the sue replica banked over his head.

"Um, Ben?" Lily said, tapping him on the shoulder. "I think we have other problems..."

A roar of a massive engine caught Ben's attention as she spoke. Next to the wreckage of the truck, was another one, undamaged and glowing faintly green in the sunlight. The symbol that Ben had taken to be an Audi logo vanished from the radiator, and it charged forward without anyone in the driver's seat.

"Wonderful." Michael said, scrambling to get out of the truck's way. He was irritable because the hot Nevada sunlight meant that the Darkness was restricted to abusing him, which didn't help a bit. "Thanks a lot."

**Da-Da-Daa, Da-Da-Da-Daaa!**

Joe was down. His arm injury wasn't fatal, but he wasn't going to be of much help if he couldn't hold his weapon. Marcus and Drake covered Pete as he helped his injured friend into cover until they could generate a plothole without being disturbed. Three clones resisted them, while the rest split up to hunt down the Spectrum personnel and society agents.

On the positive side, Rhia had found a new sniping position, and more to the point, had remained there long enough to take out a lot of those with ranged weapons. As Marcus blasted one with the Dragon Talisman, allowing Drake to finish it off with a Storm Spear, he couldn't help feeling that the odds were getting better.

A bullet bounced off a rock next to him. Marcus turned, seeing a Spectrum Agent.

"I thought you were on our side!" Then he saw the man's black uniform. "Oh..."

"You thought wrong, Earthman." Captain Black replied, taking aim with his rifle again. Marcus fired the Dragon Talisman, but as he did so, a clone brought a Klingon close-combat weapon down towards him. He was able to block in time with his Umbrella, but the shot only grazed Black, although it did melt part of his weapon. Dislodged from his hand, the Talisman skittered away over the rubble.

Drake leapt at the offending clone, engaging it, while Pete kept the other one busy. This left Marcus to deal with the Mysteron agent.

_Okay. He's probably trained in unarmed combat techniques I've never heard of. _Marcus thought, as Black stood up again._ So outnumbering him won't work. Still, I think I can copyright him though..._

He leapt to one side as Black lunged at him. Black recovered quickly, checking himself where Marcus had struck him.

"Whatever you hoped to do Earthman, it was ineffective."

Marcus was forced to dodge again. He was sure this guy was canon, so why hadn't the copyright worked? Which Talismans did he have left? Ah! Now there was an idea! Marcus rummaged in his pocket, and tried to get close up again.

**oooo**

"...against the mighty gift bestowed in my unworthy hands."

Aster's attacks didn't get anywhere near Lina. She was protected by some kind of magical forcefield. Chrys and Akai were beginning to make headway against the living tide of clones, but they would still be in the firing line when the spell was completed.

"Let the fools who stand before me be destroyed, by the power you and I possess!"

"Flat-Chested Little Girl!"

All eyes turned to Aster, who could scarcely believe the words had left her mouth. It was a low blow, no mistaking that, but if the clone thought anything like the real Lina...

Her face turned several colours that Aster had seldom seen in nature in rapid succession, then settled on a look of pure fury.

"DRAGON SLAVE!"

The spell whisked past the agile Fae and detonated somewhere in the stratosphere. The heat was off her friends, but now she had her work cut out just to survive.

"Ray Wing!" Lina cried, taking to the air to follow her. "Blast Ash! Diem Wing!"

"Kyaaaaaaaaa..."

**Da-Da-Daa, Da-Da-Da-Daaa!**

Claire threw a pine cone. Dave simply knocked it away with his axe, and ducked under one of Seiryu's bolts of energy, bringing up the axe again to intercept a blow from Tash's sword.

Under normal circumstances, Tash could simply have severed the axe shaft with metal melting heat. But these weren't normal circumstances. Dave had not been given Stuishly over-powered agility, or upper-body strength disproportionate to his build. What's more, his short-sightedness meant that blows at range were less accurate. In short, he was himself, only under the control of others. Captain Scarlet was living proof that the people thus replicated were salvageable. Maybe it would work the same way for Dave.

Maybe...

If it didn't, then the replica had to be destroyed. No-one should desecrate the dead in this manner. That would be the hardest part. If it came to it.

Dave disengaged and fell back, breathless, but somehow uninjured. Claire and Tash on the other hand were covered in little cuts and scratches where Dave had nicked them. Tash still had her twisted ankle to worry about as well, as Dave had kept her out of reach of Valerie's healing powers. More because the author asked her politely than anything else, Tash spoke.

"Dave, don't you remember us?"

Dave paused. "Of course..."

Tash blinked. She hadn't expected a response at all. She, Claire and Valerie stopped what they were doing abruptly. Dave did likewise. Mesha still lying on the rooftop and grinning like a maniac, made no attempt to alter this.

"I remember the girl I thought of as one of my best friends, cutting a woman's arm off and burning her alive because she goaded her." Dave said, his voice and eyes blank and expressionless, but his face beginning to tighten with anger. "I remember the only thing people ever had to say about me being "nice job breaking it hero". I remember being scared to be myself because of, of all things, an overgrown matchstick!"

"That's right..." Mesha cooed softly, in the flabbergasted silence that followed. "You don't have to be afraid. Not any more..."

"So that's why you gave him those manufactured nightmares!" Valerie cried. "So you could control him!" It was a fair deduction. With Dave's concious mind beginning to sympathise with Mesha's Mysteron programming, he was all the more dangerous. To Valerie's surprise, Mesha's response was to raise an eyebrow at her, as if to ask what she was talking about.

Dave's eyes locked with the healer's and flashed a sickly green. His frown deepened, but before he could respond, a bullet went straight through the side of his head.

Dave's response was to glare at Captain Blue contemptuously, as the wound healed to almost nothing in a moment.

"By the way, I added a few upgrades." Mesha giggled, reminding everyone of her presence. A bullet, a blast of fire, a pine cone and an energy bolt abruptly shot through the space where she had been a split second before, and now wasn't.

**Have it your way then... **Her voice echoed mockingly around the buildings.

Dave resumed attacking, and Valerie and Claire rushed to intercept. Tash dived behind the stack of machine parts where Blue was re-loading his gun.

"Don't do that!"

Blue looked up at her. "I'm just doing my job." he said, then his expression softened. "Although, I admit I'm more used to stopping the Mysterons by any means before things get worse..."

This statement hit Tash in the face. _That's what we do as well, with the Sues...Isn't it? _She shook her head to clear it.

"How did you cure Scarlet?" she asked, as the impact of Dave and Claire's weapons threw up a shower of sparks.

**oooo**

"Wild line!" Lily's attack punctured one of the Truck's tires, and it speared off at an angle, corrected itself, and charged back towards the fleeing group.

Chloe's explosive Rubik's Cubes disabled a small number of clones, opening a new path for them to flee down. Shirley was a blur of teeth and claws, making sure that few of the clones would be able to stand up before the heavy vehicle rolled over them. Ben reached for Bahmut again, but he was quickly set upon by several clones, so he left it slung on his back where it wouldn't impede his fast step.

Michael however had noticed something strange. It took a lot of effort for them to bring down even one clone soldier, but one shot from a mysterious beam weapon that Captain Scarlet was carrying seemed to be fatal to them. He didn't have time to wonder about this for long however, as Mariana/Snow-Owl was still around, and whipping up whatever water there was available into a devastating attack.

"Don't mess with Nukes!" Ben said, pointing at a specific area of the truck. The warhead detonated in the back and the force was directed away and up. The vehicle kept moving, but Mariana was caught in the blast. Being a Sue, she survived, although she landed hard.

"Boomhammer!" Jared managed to land a decisive blow against a clone soldier. A second clone armed with a Force Lance, a mixture of ray gun and quarter-staff from the Andromeda fandom, moved in to attack him, but was blown away by earth magic.

"How long can we keep this up?" he yelled, dancing out of the way of the truck as it roared past him.

"Lily!" Avak cried. She was standing beside the crater, apparently caught like a rabbit in the headlights of the truck as it charged towards her. Just before it struck however, she used Top Gear to dash out of the way, leaving the heavy vehicle to roll into the rubble filled crater. Because of it's momentum, it flipped over onto its back, allowing a Landslide triggered by Jared to bury it.

"Nice, but we ain't done yet!" Michael cried, exchanging blows with a Bat'leth using clone with his own sword, darkness tentacles lashing out at every foe in reach. It was at this point that the Truck decided to explode.

**Da-Da-Daa, Da-Da-Da-Daaa!**

Aster and Lina were now very high up in the sky above the mine workings. They heard the explosion and looked down. Lina seemed to decide they were high enough now, and began to recite another spell.

"Lord of the dreams that terrify, sword of the cold dark void..."

Aster gasped and sent a spear of ice at her, but Lina simply dropped out of the sky, as if in free-fall, still chanting.

"...Free yourself from the Heaven's bonds. Become one with my power, one with my body..."

Aster dived too, but Lina was using gravity to open a big lead on her.

"...and let us walk the path of destruction together. Power that can smash even the souls of the Gods!"

Lina pulled out of her dive, over the startled heads of Chrys and Akai, who were finally finishing off the last of the ground-bound clones, dark energy coalescing in her hands as she used the momentum to fly back up at Aster.

"RAGANA BLADE!"

The sword of the Lord of Nightmares struck Aster's staff. The spell's caster wasn't the real Lina Inverse, and nor did she posses the amplification talismans she had bought from Xellos in Slayers Next, so the energies released weren't fully controlled. Sparks of Chaos energy broke from the blade and lacerated Aster's face. Fae and cloned Sorceress struggled with the clashing energies for a while, Aster trying to hold back the chaos blade, and Lina pushing it home.

Something had to give, and it did. There was a bang, and both girls crashed to earth in a cloud of smoke.

"Aster!" Chrys and Akai ran to their friend as she struggled to sit up, desperate to defend her. Lina, although weakened, wasn't about to let this opportunity pass by.

"Van Rail!" she cried, through a mouthful of blood, slamming her palm into the ground. Tendrils of ice spiralled out of the ground and swirled towards the trio. Aster desperately raised a hand.

With Aster's powers over ice, it was no contest, and the spell rebounded on Lina, cocooning her in ice. Aster sighed with exhaustion.

"Poor choice, Lina-san." She muttered, as her friends helped her to her feet.

**oooo**

Marcus took the opportunity to search for the Dragon Talisman. His reprieve had been gained by using the Tiger Talisman to split Captain Black. This had worked better than he had hoped, as instead of splitting him into good and bad halves, the dormant human part of him had been released.

The society agent looked over his shoulder at them. Conrad Turner was fighting his Mysteron self like a man possessed, and Marcus could only imagine what the man had seen as his body had been used to kill and destroy in the name of the Mysterons. Surely that would drive anyone insane...

He caught sight of the dropped Talisman and reached for it. No sooner had his fingers closed over it, than the rubble shifted as the heavy lorry nose-dived into it and flipped. Drake and Pete gestured him over to the side of the crater, opposite the now buried vehicle. It was at this point that it decided to explode.

The two Captain Black's were blown into the crater wall and joined together again. Marcus landed on top of him and was promptly split up by the Talisman's power.

Dazed, Drake peered over the crater edge.

"Okay, both Marcus' are out cold." he paused. "Where's Captain Black?"

**oooo**

Mesha looked up from her binoculars as Captain Black appeared next to her, in the same manner as he had vanished from the crater.

"Enjoy getting your butt kicked?" she asked, teasingly. The Mysteron Agent frowned.

"Have they observed our secondary objective?" he asked in turn. His tone was slow and deliberate

"Not that I can tell."

"Then I have succeeded in my endeavour." Black paused. "I would note that you failed to inform us of certain information."

"Like what?" Mesha was looking back at the battle from the hilltop, uninterested.

"The Mysterons expected this society to be of similar purpose and organisation to Spectrum. You did not tell us the degree of unfamiliar powers they possessed."

"They're barely competent enough to use them." Mesha retorted, annoyed that she should have to justify herself. Her earlier effort had made sure the Mysteron's loyalty wasn't dependant on her powers, but she wasn't aware of how fragile her control was... Unaware of the Copyright, she turned on the Sueish charm again. Fortunately for her, she was still wearing the Archangel necklace. "Surely you can deal with that?"

"Even incompetence of use can threaten us. It is better we do not keep secrets..."

"I'll make a note of that." Mesha replied, focusing her binoculars on the battle again, unknowing of how close she had come to disaster. She wondered vaguely what Valerie had meant by manufactured nightmares, but decided to think about that later.

**oooo**

General Idea stood on Martha's dashboard. In the brief moments before he was forced to run from the cloned army, Jared had ordered him and the small detachment of LPGB he had with him to search Dave's Land Rover for anything that might be useful in combating the Mysteronised clones.

The General himself however was privately convinced that the Mysterons were aligned with the Soviet Union. And he didn't like the sound of this Bereznik state he had run across in the background of this fandom either...

"General Idea, Sir!" Idea's electric thoughts returned to the present.

"Captain Crunch?"

"We have completed our inventory, Sir."

"Report."

"Plastic carrier bags quantity two, containing one complete set of clothing and a pair of boots. All non-ferrous. One standard issue Communicator. One pair of Specsavers glasses, associated case, and clip-on sunglasses..."

"Anything that isn't standard issue?" Idea queried.

"Yes sir. One device of Society manufacture matching the description of experimental gadget designated "Guest Appearance". Also, one Poke Ball of the "Heal Ball" variant, containing unidentified Pokemon." Captain Crunch paused. "Permission to speak freely, sir."

"Granted."

"The deceased was not known for carrying superfluous items around with him. It is my strong belief that both the anomalous items are present for a good reason."

"Agreed Captain. But lets not waste time speculating on what these reasons were. Prepare to move out, the Admiral needs this information."

"Si- Get Down Sir!" Crunch roared. General Idea turned, wondering why Crunch had addressed him in Spanish, and only just got out of the way in time. Jared's Boomhammer impacted against the Land Rover's bonnet, bounced off and passed straight through the windscreen, striking the centre console before coming to rest on the back seat. The sonic boom of it's impact in the car's front shattered all the windows, and the computer screen in the dashboard.

"Are you alright Sir?" came a shout.

"Never mind that!" Idea replied, lifting a large piece of glass off himself. "That was the Admiral's weapon. At best he is disarmed, at worst captured by Soviet agents! Move out!"

"Warning. Handbrake has been disabled." said Martha sweetly.

The Land Rover was indeed in motion, slow now, but gathering pace all the time.

"Well this makes deployment easier." Idea remarked. "Miss Martha. Engage engine and apply brakes."

"Drive controls for this vehicle are not governed by this system. Please fasten your seatbelts and rejoin the nearest main road."

"Oh..."

**Da-Da-Daa, Da-Da-Da-Daaa!**

A minute or so earlier...

Jared cried out as Mariana, grounded but still fighting, lifted him of the ground with a gust of extremely cold wind, letting go of his Boomhammer as he did so, and allowing it to be blown away. He landed on top of Ben.

"T-t-t-thanks for the s-s-s-soft landing mate."

"Wwooommbbbsol.."

"Sorry?" Jared asked moving his foot.

"I said "You need your boots re-soling"." Ben repeated.

Both men suddenly remembered they were in battle, just in time to see Rhia and Cristoph slide between Snow-Owl and them, still fighting off the cloud of cloned Pokemon. Their two sets of foes promptly became entangled with each other, but only briefly. They soon came at the four agents again, coordinating their attacks with each other.

It was then that Michael realised that his group of agents had been forced into a dead end. There was no-where for them to retreat to, and as he saw Drake and Pete heading for them, both supporting a Marcus and Joe covering their retreat as best he could, he realised that returning to the library was their only option.

"Warning, unknown interference." said his plothole generator.

"Stacey, Phoenixia, we're locked!" he yelled into his communicator. There was no response. Apparently they were on their own for the next few minutes. He looked down at the device again, and his eyes were drawn to the Phoenix morpher on his wrist.

Five times only... Only in major emergencies... It was becoming hard to known what those emergencies were. Activate it too soon, and he would waste the power. Too late... He looked up at the agents, his colleagues, his friends. If he guessed wrong, then one or more of them might die.

Captain Scarlet seemed to be having trouble with his weapon. He looked at Michael. No words were spoken.

_You're obviously an amateur organisation...Prepared physically, but not mentally...You start taking things for granted, its all the harder when the miracle you're depending on fails to turn up..._

Scarlet noted Michael's gaze, and nodded, almost imperceptibly.

_Get on with it will you!_ The Darkness growled, impatiently.

_Fine then. _Michael thought_. We make our own miracles. _The Chief Agent's hand crept towards the activator.

It was at this point, music caught Michael's ears.

He looked up again, just in time to move out of the way of Martha, as the LPGB steered her towards the group of agents. It was just as well they had accidentally switched her stereo on, or whatever they had done, or he wouldn't have noticed them.

The plastic soldiers wrestled as best they could with the vehicle's heavy steering, too early to be power-assisted, but Martha's next destination was looming ahead of them. A building's wall.

The impact was undramatic. The Land Rover did not crumple up, but merely struck the brickwork and shuddered. There was the sound of part of the mechanics underneath the vehicle coming loose, and the patter of the plastic figures of the LPGB falling all over the bonnet. It was now possible to hear exactly what was blaring from her speakers.

Caramelldansen.

All fire stopped, both sides paralysed by the sheer ridiculousness of the situation. There was a flash of light from the front passenger seat, which coalesced on Martha's roof.

A blue-black creature with scary eyes surveyed the scene calmly, the tail with the yellow throwing star on the end twitching slightly. Still, no one moved.

Dave's Luxray noted the music and looked down through the shattered sun-roof.

"Ray?"

Captain Crunch, in something of a daze, pushed a button. A different music track began to play.

_This bloody road remains a mystery. This sudden darkness fills the air. _

Asuka grinned. This was her kind of battle music. Leaping from the roof, the Luxray charged into battle, as the clones finally resumed fire.

**oooo**

"You won't help us?" Harriet was annoyed, but not exactly surprised with the Counter Guardian's response.

"Not our problem." Saito said, brusquely. "Not serious enough for us to be needed."

"I thought it was your job to stop these things before they got worse!" Jess exclaimed. "Now you're saying you can't stop them until it gets beyond the point you should have stopped them at?"

"I would point out before we go any further," Aramayis said, in the confused pause this statement created, and gesturing to the monitor. "That the society seems to be winning. Quite conclusively, unless I'm mistaken." He was right. The tide of battle around Captain Scarlet and Michael seemed to have turned with Asuka's intervention.

"That still leaves Dave..." Miri murmured.

**oooo**

Claire hadn't planned to be fighting to the death when she woke up this morning, and if she had, she certainly wouldn't have guessed that it would be Dave she was facing. She disengaged, allowing Valerie to hit him in the neck with an energy bolt. He healed himself close to instantly, and Claire found herself wondering vaguely how Jack Harkness would react if he saw this...

Tash swooped in again, Nephthys swishing to and fro, knocking aside his axe blows. One swing allowed the sword to connect with the hook of the axe, and yanked it from Dave's hands.

Then something neither Claire, nor Val had expected happened. Nephthys vanished, and Tash hugged Dave, her arms sliding beneath his shoulders and locking behind him in a death grip. Tash's wings spread out to their maximum span, and the two of them rocketed skywards.

The Girls looked at each other, then at Blue for an explanation. Before he could reply however, all three of them noted the music, punctuated by the sounds of battle.

"Tash knows what she's doing..." Claire said, moving towards the noise, all the while casting fleeting glances at the red/orange spark vanishing into the clouds.

**Da-Da-Daa, Da-Da-Da-Daaa!**

_Won't anybody help us? What're we running for? When there's nowhere..._

Asuka was mopping up the last of the clone troopers now, her Discharge filling the air with static. They were panicking now, targeting her instead of the society agents, apparently she was more of a threat to them. This meant that it was fairly simple for the society agents to lay down a suppressing fire.

_...nowhere we can run to anymore!_

As the Luxray connected a Thunder Fang with Mariana, Michael felt Scarlet tap on his shoulder.

"What is that?" he shouted over the music, indicating Asuka.

"Lion with X-ray eyes and the powers of an electric eel." he said, quickly. "Not sure why she's doing so well though..."

_We can't afford to be innocent. Stand up and face the enemy. _

A clone with a large Katana made as if to bisect the Luxray as she landed near him after a jump. He suddenly found Akai's spear sticking out of his chest. And then he had a set of electrified fangs in his shin.

"Mysterons are impervious to X-rays and vulnerable to High Voltage Electricity." Scarlet replied, taking out another clone with his repaired weapon. "That's how this Electrode Rifle works."

"You tell us this now?" Michael was suddenly struck by how thorough Dave was... Had been.

_Be fair, you never asked him, did you? _Came a sarcastic voice in the back of his mind.

_It's a do or die-ie-ie-ie-ie..._

Combat stopped again, as if by some unspoken agreement. The LPGB could be heard debating amongst themselves how to stop the CD skipping.

"Advise application of manual overshoe!"

"Make sense Major Detail!"

"Kick it sir!"

_ie-ie-ie-ie situation. _

The fighting picked up where it had left off, as if it had never stopped.

_We will be Invincible!_

Scarlet shouted a warning. Michael turned around in time to see another clone with a very big gun standing some way behind him, obviously in the final stages of charging to fire.

_And with the power of conviction, there is no sacrifice!_

An energy bolt struck the power pack, detonating it, and spreading the unfortunate man over a wide area.

Valerie grimaced, she hadn't meant to do that, but it had saved Michael.

_Its a do or die situation. We will be Invincible! _

The song finished just as the battle ended. Asuka finally allowed herself the luxury of collapsing under the weight of a dozen minor injuries and bullet ricochets. Had she been under level 70, she wouldn't have survived. The society agents spread out, making sure all of their foes were actually dead, tending their wounded, searching for other halves they had been separated from. Everyone was accounted for, except...

"Where's Tash?" Michael asked. Claire and Valerie looked at each other, then up in the sky, where a tiny dot was only just visible.

**oooo**

Tash bit her lip to stop herself crying out. Dave was punching, kicking, doing everything in his power to hurt her, uncaring they were now almost a mile up in the sky.

She didn't know what the "London Car View" was, or how high it had been. All she knew was that somehow, falling from such a height had been a major factor in Captain Scarlet's De-Mysteronisation.

She glanced down. This was high enough, surely? If he falls too far...

_Could I...?_

Inexplicably, her grip tightened, as if hoping Dave would pass out from lack of oxygen.

He didn't.

The composite plates in Dave's toe caps found her shins again, and Tash was sure she felt something break. She flinched in pain, and heard something rip. Cold air buffeted her front.

Tash hadn't realised that she'd closed her eyes, and opened them. Dave was falling away, part of her blouse in his outstretched right hand. His face registered neither fear, nor anger.

It was blank. Empty.

**oooo**

"Um...Guys...?" said Ben, his gaze firmly on the descending dot.

It was quite easy to tell where Dave was going to land, and everyone scrambled to reach the spot as fast as they could.

Dave landed hard, and deep in the ground, closely followed by Tash, who was using her wings to keep the weight off her injuries. Few noticed she was holding her ripped blouse closed, as her face was stricken.

"Please...please let that work..."

Scarlet started forwards, but just as he reached him, Dave's arm twitched, then spun almost comically back into its accustomed position.

"You're kidding..." Someone murmured.

The former agent pulled himself out of the hole his impact had created, the dust falling away from his clothes as they too repaired themselves, cracks and pops signifying his bones returning to normal.

Scarlet took a step back and raised the Electrode rifle, but Dave reached out, and pushed it down, away from himself. His blank eyes flashed green.

Mysteron Green.

Before anyone could react, Asuka sprang forward, clamping her jaws around Dave's throat. Only when he let go of the rifle to try and pry her off did she start to pass current through them. She knew Scarlet was just as vulnerable to her powers.

Dave gave a muted gurgling noise, then fell over under the Pokemon's weight. The Luxray clung on for a moment longer, but Dave didn't even twitch this time.

It was over.

**oooo**

"The evacuation of the reserves is completed...It is Done." Black commented.

Mesha grinned. "Good. Now we proceed to the next stage of the plan." She said. A split second later, the ridge where they had observed the battle was vacant, as if they had never been there.

**Da-Da-Daa, Da-Da-Da-Daaa!**

Michael, Ben and Lily were attempting to explain to Captain Blue what was going on in way that made some kind of sense to him. Their success was varied in this, but as long as Mesha was still in the fandom, it was clear they'd have to establish some kind of understanding if they were going to be sticking around for a while.

A few agents had been brought to, and indeed sent out of, the fandom by Tash's doors as the plotholes were still not working, and the society were making sure there were no extra clones waiting in the ruins to ambush them. Scarlet had sent for some extra Spectrum back-up agents to provide a cordon around the mine.

When the rain started, Claire and Miri had to bodily pick Asuka up and carry her into the shelter of a nearby shed, as she was almost completely catatonic. She had only done what Dave had asked her to do in the event of his being taken over -Valerie had found this out pretty quick- but that didn't alter the fact that it had been hard for her.

Dave himself lay under a tarpaulin, as they didn't dare bring him back to the library just yet. As the wind got up, it blew it off his head briefly, allowing the rain to strike his face. However, when Avak covered him up again, he failed to notice that he wasn't as pale as he should have been...

**oooo**

"Mesha's not getting away with this!" Said Louise firmly. "Can't we get in yet?"

Phoenixia shook her head. She, Charis and Emily were working at full tilt to try and get the plotholes to the Captain Scarlet fandom working again, thus far with little success. Tash was needed at the mine so the team there weren't completely cut off and Adrian was in no position to be distracted, so they left him to get on with whatever he was doing.

"I'd love to help." Said a message on one of the monitors. "but my hands are just collections of zeros and ones. Oh dear. Poor, poor Dave (sniff)."

The Blue Italic font that (a) had used to compose this note made it clear she was being sarcastic, and Harriet only paid as much attention to it as was required to push the delete key.

"Alright." the society leader said at last. "As soon as we have plotholes again, _I'll_ lead a team in there personally. Louise is right. Mesha's gonna pay!"

**oooo**

In the Medical wing, Valerie was treating the injured agents. Aster was exhausted, but her injuries were mostly cosmetic, so she left Aimee to clean her up, and dealt with Joe's arm.

It was as she picked up her records, meaning to write down exactly what medicine she had given to him, that she suddenly felt something strange on the edge of her empathic senses.

A wayward emotion. Vague and insubstantial, but definitely present. She put her clipboard down to focus on it, and the emotion abruptly vanished off her mental radar.

The healer frowned, and took her obsidian pendant off. If it turned up again, she'd know about it for sure. Turning to continue, she touched the clipboard lightly...

_...abandon us?...Pushing it a bit...Traitor..._

Valerie dropped the clipboard with a yelp of surprise that drew Rhia over from Cristoph's bedside.

"The paper. Its...Psychic!"

Rhia looked from the dropped medical report to Valerie and her eyes widened.

"Psychic paper is from Doctor Who..."

Mesha set Dave up by giving him nightmares that stirred his emotions. Something in the library was giving him these nightmares by a psychic signal that Phoenixia couldn't pin down. The library's paperwork bred at an exponential rate. Psychic paper had evidently cross-bred with it. It's native fandom was Doctor Who. So was Mesha's...

The half-second it took Valerie to make this deductive leap seemed to her to be a century long.

"Get Harriet down here, now!"

**oooo**

Captain Scarlet was still marvelling at the society. He had seen a great many strange things in his career as a Spectrum agent.

An alien plant that caused three spaceships to crash as its mutated vines lashed wildly in the cabin, a fantastic city built in secret on the lunar surface by the Mysterons, and much more besides...

And yet all that was nothing next to the sight of the Jun-Akuma hovering above Akai's head, apparently balancing an Umbrella on top of its own head as she checked the clones for signs of life.

"Paul, over here!"

Scarlet shook his mind back to the present and walked over to where Blue was standing, staring at the ground.

"What do you make of this?"

Several hand-sized fragments of ice were scattered over a wide area, as if something had dropped an ice sculpture from a great height, causing it to shatter. Scarlet shrugged.

"One of the society could throw ice around Adam. Remember the girl with blue hair? One of her shots must have gone wild."

Blue frowned. "She struck me as being a better shot than that..." he stopped, and picked up a fragment that had caught his attention. Encased inside, was a lock of red hair.

**oooo**

Tash sat in the shelter of a building, wearing Claire's coat to cover her ripped blouse. Her two sisters sat next to her with Asuka across their laps. It was Miri that spoke first.

"Stroking a kitty is supposed to be therapeutic, Aneki." she said, gesturing at the grief-stricken Luxray. "Maybe it'll do both of you good."

"I've got my own kitty, thanks..." Tash replied, smiling faintly. "And to be honest, people that have come back..."

_Are the last thing I want to think about right now. _She silently finished.

Asuka glared at Tash with tear-soaked eyes. "Ray Lux RAY!" she snapped, standing up with a sharp crack of static that had both Miri and Claire feeling like they had just been punched in the chest.

Tash wasn't so good at Pokemon languages, but she got the drift of what she had said.

"It's not fair?" she repeated, as if confirming it. "Agreed. Dave was my friend too, and- You don't mean that?"

Asuka had interrupted, shaking her head and clearly frustrated by the language difference.

"You don't think its fair Adrian gets to come back properly and Dave doesn't?" Claire suggested. The Luxray nodded.

"It doesn't work like that." Miri said, stroking the electric Pokemon in an attempt to get her to calm down. "Adrian was just a bit... luckier."

Lucky was a poor word to describe what had happened, and everyone present knew it.

"Hmmmmm. Ray ray Luxray..." Asuka replied, casting a suspicious glare at Tash as if she had just confirmed something she had suspected for a while...

"Um, I hate to interrupt..." Michael stuck his head into the shelter, a thankful distraction from the building tension. "Captain Scarlet has just told me that all the clones we've faced thus far can't equate to more than half of what he and Dave saw in the tunnels earlier. And it gets better! The clone of Lina Inverse is missing. We think she's thawed herself out and is lying in wait around the ruins."

Tash looked up at the Luxray again. "Think what you like Asuka, but we need your help now." Asuka nodded slowly. Tash understood. She would help because duty demanded it, not for any other reason.

**oooo**

The minutes, and the rain squall, passed, and still there was no sign of Lina or any other clones, despite an exhaustive search of the mine buildings. When the society and Spectrum met again, they reached the conclusion she was long gone. It was at this point that someone noticed they had lost contact with base again.

Tash stood to open a door back to the library.

"Befis Bring!"

The ground split under everyone's feet, and swallowed them up to their calves, which on Asuka was up to her chin. All except Tash, who of course could fly. Sure enough, there was the cloned sorceress, waiting to fire again. She fled over the mine, and Tash gave chase.

"Jurai-Ke-" Tash stopped in horror as her eyes alighted upon something Lina had just flown over. The tarpaulin that Dave was under had been rolled back, revealing that there was nothing underneath! He had vanished.

"Elmekia Lance!"

The moment of distraction cost Tash dearly. Although she was able to move sufficiently for the spell to be robbed of it's lethality, it snapped her head to one side in passing, and she blacked out.

Drake and Michael were the first to free themselves, and ran towards where Tash had crashed. Where Lina was standing over her...

"Digger Bolt!" Her arm crackled with power as the spell charged.

Another arm intercepted hers as it fell towards the prone society leader. Lina's eyes widened in shock as her assailant guided her electrified palm into her own stomach. Being an electric attack, the result was as it had been for the rest of the clones.

Michael and Drake held up their weapons in fright as the cloned sorceress collapsed at the feet of her attacker. His face hidden in shadows as he turned to regard them...

**To Be Continued...**

**

* * *

**Hee hee. Sorry fans, you'll have to wait til next time!

In the meantime, if I've missed anything... Well, you know the drill by now...


	4. Chapter 4

Penultimate chapter, coming in for landing! *Screeches, and sounds of tearing metal and glass are heard*

I own nothing but my Self-Insert and... Well I suppose Asuka is officially a character now I've give her a battle theme. ^^ Enjoy!

**

* * *

**

It doesn't end here!

"What's wrong?" The figure asked, stepping out of the shadows where his brown hair was visible to all who cared to look. Drake's reaction was understandable, and immediate.

"Storm Spear!" he cried, thrusting his weapon into the flesh of Dave's left arm. Dave cried out and staggered backwards in pain.

"What the...!"

"Oh not again!" Claire said, arriving at Michael's shoulder at this point, arm blades materialising.

Michael stopped her and told her to go and check Tash. Something was wrong here.

Dave's eyes were no longer blank, but alive, burning with anger, and struggling to focus on Drake in the absence of his glasses. He was fumbling for an axe that Tash had knocked away from him half an hour before, just as confused as they were.

"Look, sorry I lost it with you Drake, but that was a bit far wasn't it?"

The armoured agent looked at Michael out of the corner of his eye, keeping Dave covered with his raised spear all the time. He could tell something was up. Michael cast his eye over the group still struggling to extract themselves from the ground. Exactly who did they have if this situation turned ugly?

Claire, Miri, Drake, Akai, Karrisa, Captains Scarlet and Blue, Lily, Avak, Shirley and Ben, and Asuka of course.

"She's out cold, but alive." Claire piped up. "What did he do to her?"

"Probably saved her life..." Michael answered.

"You sound surprised at that fact Mr Chief Agent, _Sir_." Dave retorted. "Is this because I tried to save those Sues instead of leaving them to die? Where are they anyway?" he asked suspiciously.

"You don't remember?" Claire asked, incredulously.

"I try to do a good thing," Dave went on as if he hadn't heard her, "and the next thing I know I'm being set upon like you've been waiting for the excuse all week."

This statement, together with his tone, brought Asuka's accusations back to Michael's mind.

"Dave, look at your arm." said Miri gently.

"Why, wha..." Dave stopped, only now realising that the injury Drake had given him wasn't hurting any more. He moved his arm around experimentally, and the penny seemed to drop. He looked down at Asuka.

"How do I look to you?"

The Luxray shook her head, her eyes full of tears.

"She's already had to kill you once..." Claire said. Dave was silent for a few moments.

"That explains a lot..." he muttered, his face beginning to drain of colour.

"Captain Scarlet?" Blue said quietly. Scarlet cocked his head and looked at Dave curiously.

"Its strange..." he replied. "There's a Mysteron presence about him all right... but it's not overwhelming. I'm not sweating or anything... I can ignore it..."

"Has this happened before?" Ben asked.

Scarlet shrugged. "I've never met anyone that's been through the same set of circumstances as I have before, so I couldn't tell you for sure what that feels like."

"Seems a little bit convenient..." Drake said. Dave, who had now sat down on a nearby barrel to collect his thoughts, looked up at him incredulously.

"The same could be said of Adrian's return, but I don't hear you complaining about that!" he said.

"Hey come on now, he's disorientated." Michael put in, "He's just had... well, a traumatic experience, shall we say... Can we get through to the library and update them on this?"

Everyone checked their communicators, which still weren't working. Neither were the plothole generators, so with Tash out cold they were completely cut off.

"Wouldn't whoever's on monitor duty notice us standing around talking to someone who's supposed to be dead?" Lily asked.

**oooo**

"What happened?" Harriet asked, just back from the medical wing and the psychic paper into another problem.

"I don't know." Gareth replied, thumping the snow-screened monitor in frustration. "Audio and visual feed from the Captain Scarlet fandom just cut a few minutes ago. No explanation."

"I've still got most of the life-signs though." Stacy said, "For the moment at least. It's hard to keep locked on to them, I keep losing one or two people temporarily..."

"Is Adrian likely to be back any time soon?"

"I think he's winning." Gareth said, "Slowly though..."

"We'll get you in Harriet." Emily said, hugging her guardian briefly, before vanishing under the portal control panel again. Harriet smiled at her charge's feet, then spoke into the microphone.

"All agents not on monitor or basement duty in the next four hours are to report to the training room, equipped to deploy for a priority one mission at a moment's notice." She said, reasonably sure that the training room was directly across from the monitor room today. "I don't care if you're usually asleep at this hour. This is a matter of pride, dignity and most importantly, revenge. I'm leading this one, and I need all of you!"

Land of Hope and Glory abruptly began to play over the speakers, causing everyone in the monitor room to look at Phoenixia. The ex-hologram grinned sheepishly.

"Sorry, couldn't resist."

**oooo**

"Mayday, Mayday, Mayday." said the voice in Lieutenant Green's ears. "This is Charlie Oscar Six Five. Suffering fuel leak. Due to nature of cargo we must land immediately. Ditching is not, repeat, not an option."

The officer from Trinidad turned to his superior and advised him of the situation. Colonel White, former British Navy and U.S.S veteran, was extremely wary.

"I think we've been here before Lieutenant." He said. "It wouldn't be the first time the Mysterons have tried to crash an aircraft into Cloudbase. Run a full check on it's aircraft registry, and tell Captain Ochre to focus a long-range Mysteron detector on it."

He turned to the microphone on his desk. "Charlie Oscar Six Five, this is Spectrum Cloudbase. Please state your registry and cargo."

"Roger Spectrum. 356 Yankee, Papa, Echo." The woman paused momentarily before continuing. "Regret unable to disclose nature of classified cargo..."

"Colonel," Green reported, "356YPE identifies as a World Military transport aircraft, recently assigned to Project Depthprobe."

White frowned, and manipulated a few switches on his console. "Charlie Oscar Six Five, frequency is now secure. Your connection to Project Depthprobe is known to us. This suggests that your cargo is Pentatholium fuel. Please confirm."

"Confirmed Spectrum." The woman replied, sounding relieved. "I'm flying a bomb here."

Both Green and White abruptly had a vision of the beautiful pilot (She had to be with a voice like that) going up in a fireball large enough to destroy an area of land the size of Arizona...

"Ochre to Colonel White. Detector confirms the aircraft is not, repeat not composed of Mysteronised materials."

White let out his breath, unaware he had been holding it. Disregarding the possibility that the pilot could in fact be a Mysteron agent, he gave his clearance for the aircraft to land.

**oooo**

"Too easy." Mesha complained, yawning as the aircraft was caught in Cloudbase's Spectrafan for landing.

Captain Black turned to the black uniformed clones behind them in the fuselage. "You all know your appointed tasks. Cloudbase will be secured."

"Those Mysteron instructions will be carried out..." four-score throats replied.

**oooo**

"Still nothing?" Michael asked Karrisa, who was slowly working through all the tricks she could remember Charis teaching her about getting a signal in difficult circumstances. The answer was a negative.

"I've still got one idea..." Karrisa said, "Has anyone got a Slinky?"

The sheer ridiculousness of that question hung in the air for a full ten seconds. "Right. In that case, we're stuck."

"I'm still worried about Tash, Baby." said Claire. "If we can't get her back to the library, we should find a hospital that won't ask too many questions about her wings." They'd put the unconscious Society Leader in the recovery position, but she showed no signs of waking any time soon. This meant that she wouldn't be able to retract her wings and hide them.

"I'll try and get in touch with Doctor Fawn on Cloudbase." Scarlet said, folding his mouth-mic down from the peak of his cap. Blue did the same.

"Captain Blue to Captain Buff, can you arrange an MSV to rendezvous with us here and take us to the airfield please?"

"Better make that two."

All eyes turned to Dave.

"One leader in each. I mean, tough as MSV's are, it would only take one lucky shot to decapitate the society otherwise..." he stopped. Blue considered this, and amended the instruction accordingly.

"You say that like there's an attack coming." Shirley said suspiciously. "Do you know something we don't?"

"The Square root to the power of twenty nine of the trigonometric amplitude of Eighty seven, divided by the quantitative hydraxis of nine hundred and fifty six to the power of seventy seven is forty five thousand, nine hundred and sixty nine." Dave replied, irritably. "Bet you didn't know that!"

"Captain Scarlet to Cloudbase!" Scarlet repeated, for the third time. "Lieutenant Green please respond."

"I'm sure that's right..." Miri said, in a tone that said otherwise. "But given you were trying to kill us earlier, it just looks a bit weird for you to be giving us advice."

"Scarlet to Captain Ochre." Scarlet said into his com-link. "Ochre, Magenta. Can anyone on Cloudbase hear me?"

"Fair point," Dave conceded. "But I can't have been trying very hard. You're all still here!"

"Adam? I think my long range receiver is playing up. Can you get through to Cloudbase?"

Drake actually sniggered at this. "Dave you're hardly badass, no offence."

"I don't need to be." Dave replied. "I'm smart. Look at Mesha for example. She wouldn't last long against the society en masse, so she resorts to using clone soldiers. If _**I**_ wanted to bring the society down-"

"Captain Blue to Symphony Angel?" Blue said, growing frustrated with the link himself. "Damn, nothing!" This exclamation caught everyone's attention.

"What's the problem?" Michael asked him, a grim foreboding beginning to form in the pit of his stomach.

"We can't raise Cloudbase. They're receiving, just not answering."

"I've just had a nasty thought..." Lily said quietly.

"Explain." Michael replied

"One: We were open targets, and yet Lina goes for Tash? She was trying to cut us off, not kill us. Two: If Harriet still thinks Dave is dead, she'll lead the society into the fandom to get revenge on Mesha. Three: We know that half the clones Dave and Scarlet saw in the tunnels are missing..." She trailed off.

"She'll walk right into a trap!" Michael said, starting to go pale.

**oooo**

On emerging from the Plothole, Harriet's team of society agents found themselves on a tennis court. The distinct vibration of engines under their feet however, betrayed the fact that they were several miles up in the air on board the Spectrum headquarters craft. Not that they had much time to notice this...

"We've been waiting for you, Society Ants!" said a voice. "Don't try to resist."

They were surrounded by classic Primeval cleaners. However, where the clones at the mine had been equipped with seemingly random weapons, these ones were completely standardised. Each one had a full set of Kevlar body armour, and was armed with a Star Trek Compression rifle. The exceptions to this were five Grey-scaled humanoids that were each wielding a different Space Marine heavy weapon from the Warhammer 40,000 Fandom. Ossa instantly recognised these as Jem'hadar.

"Tut tut." said Mesha, "You are so predictable Marlow. Any affront to your pride and you gather as many of your little crusaders as you can, and come to make me pay for it."

"You-" Harriet began. The whine of a Plasma Cannon charging up cut her off.

"Ah ah ah. I do the talking here." Said Mesha sweetly, gesturing for the Reptile-skinned humanoid to stand down. "I knew you would find the loophole in the interference sooner or later, and just so you know it's shut for good now. Now drop your weapons and surrender. No matter how good some of you are, any resistance and most of you will die."

Harriet looked over her team. She silently cursed herself for leaving Kyle behind. The Heaven and Earth Worldly Secret Art would be just the thing they needed right now. But of course at the time she'd been persuaded that they needed a more powerful agent like him back at the library to deal with any other high-level Sues that turned up, and since Mesha was only level 5 anyway, she hadn't thought it necessary.

Leaving Marcus in charge, and most of those who had seen combat already to recover, she had taken Ossa, Aimee, Jamie, Phoenixia, Ingrid, Wille, Rhia, Pete, Tom...Hold on a minute...

Harriet sighed with the appearance of resignation, and told them to put their weapons down, hoping that the two they were missing had at least ended up in the same fandom.

**oooo**

She did not panic.

As Dianne Simms, she was one of the best pilots in the world. As Rhapsody Angel, she was part of the most deadly air-combat fighting force of the Twenty-First century. Anyone who thought that the only five women in senior Spectrum positions were solely decorative would be in for a shock if they found themselves in an air battle with them.

Fortunate enough to be in the Angel Aircraft maintenance bay when the clone troopers moved to secure Cloudbase, she had swiftly disabled the man sent to apprehend her with a handy wrench, and taken stock of her options.

She had considered returning to the Amber Room to try and gain an aircraft to escape the base.

Considered, and rejected. It was predictable, and more to the point, impossible, as the order to launch Angels had to come from the now occupied bridge.

She was in the process of finding a pressure suit and parachute to carry out her back up plan, when something struck her in the back. Hard.

Too highly trained not to be aware of her assailant a split second before he struck, she rolled to her feet with the momentum of her fall, ready to drive a bullet from her pistol into him, only to find that there was no-one there.

Instead of wasting bullets with speculative fire, Rhapsody swung the large wrench in her other hand. Feeling it glance off something, she aimed carefully, and was rewarded with a grunt of pain, and a grey shoulder, swiftly fading back into visibility, connecting with her abdomen.

Winded, the pilot collapsed to the floor, giving her a good view of her attacker. Ignoring his wound completely, the Jem'hadar Scout trooper lifted a pistol of an unfamiliar design from his belt, raising it as if to fire.

At this point, she was given a spectacular reprieve by two women who looked to be in their mid-twenties falling out of mid-air on top of him.

"Ali, get off me..." Louise mumbled through her companion's cloak.

"Yes mother." Alice looked up and saw Rhapsody, and grinned. "Hi, can I glomp you?"

"Who are you, and what are you doing here?" the Angel asked.

"Where's our team, and why am I lying on top of a Jem'hadar?" Louise added, looking around.

"Wa-hey." said Alice.

A pair of running feet forestalled any further conversation, as a cleaner clone rounded the corner and raised his weapon. Rhapsody cracked off a shot to his head from where she lay, which fouled his aim and made him stumble. Alice took advantage of the opportunity to stab him with her power sword. The replicant duly went down like a sack of spuds.

"Lets compare notes later..." Rhapsody said, pragmatically.

**oooo**

"Great." Marcus snapped, "Now we've lost _**all **_contact."

"I've got a light at the end of the tunnel for you." Emily said. "If these readings are right, most of the interference is being transmitted from outside the Captain Scarlet fandom. If we can deal with that bit, we should be able to punch through the rest."

"Where?" The acting Society Leader still had a headache from combat in the fandom earlier, and it was bothering him.

"Still looking..."

"Just let me at it." Stacy said, although the subtle change in facial expression and pitch of her voice suggested the words were Ezra's.

"This is beginning to look like a divide and conquer strategy." Kyle surmised.

Marcus had worked this out already, but bit back his response and settled for nodding instead.

"It's not as if we have a lot of choice..." he sighed at last.

**oooo**

"Bit cramped in here..." Ingrid commented. All the Spectrum commanders, together with the society team (minus Alice, Louise and Rhapsody of course) had been crammed into Cloudbase's brig. Harriet however had been taken somewhere else, for heaven knew what purpose. They had room to stand up, but only just.

"It wasn't designed for this." Colonel White confirmed.

"I don't know." said Phoenixia, smiling, "It could be worse." Given that she had Destiny Angel crammed in next to her on one side and Captain Grey on the other...

Before anyone could come up with a suitable response, the door to the brig opened, and Captain Black walked in. He stood between the closing outer door and the clear plastic cell wall, regarding them coolly.

"Who is in authority among your team of... agents?" he asked at last, through the intercom.

"I... guess that's me..." said Phoenixia, squeezing through to the wall. No one objected.

"Then it is you I would address."

"I hope I heard you right!" she replied, grinning. Black frowned slightly.

"Look, what is going on here?" White asked, his patience frayed thin. Black looked at him.

"You claim, Colonel White, that Spectrum destroyed the Martian city of the Mysterons because the scanning devices employed against the MEV bore a loose resemblance to the weapon emplacements of your own military bases. In the same way, Miss Yana claims to be persecuted by this society because she in turn bears a loose resemblance to an atypically mad member of her kind by the name of Willowe Foxblade.

"Furthermore, she charges Harriet Marlow with the creation of the aforementioned individual, with the intent of starting the conflict between these two factions, so that her society could then proceed with their purpose of annihilating all members of her kind, regardless of affiliation."

There was a moments silence. Then every member of the society present simultaneously expressed their belief that this was untrue in a variety of different manners, none of which are suitable for description here. Phoenixia eventually restored a semblance of order.

"Oh..." White said, "I see..."

"Her case then, is a half truth?" Black put to Phoenixia.

"It's complicated." She replied. "Harriet did create Willowe, but... well that's a long story... The point is that Mesha has the power to manipulate and control the world around her to the point it causes, to use a late colleague's words, severe nausea for everyone."

Black thought for a few moments.

"I did think it odd that the non-commissioned personnel of Cloudbase accepted her presence without question..." he frowned. "Thinking upon it, the orders of the Mysterons have been... atypical since her arrival... Her intentions are incompatible with those of the Mysterons, this much is clear." It seemed that the copyright had finally overcome the Archangel necklace.

"Then you'll help us?"

Black fixed Rhia with a stern glare. "I cannot defy the Mysterons, who instructed me to serve her."

"But you _**can**_ reinterpret her orders..." said White, shrewdly.

"_**I **_did not say that." Black's face briefly showed a slight smile. "I can tell you three things. Firstly; Harriet Marlow is in some discomfort, but alive. She will likely continue to be so at least until Cloudbase reaches its new position. Where this is, I do not know, but appears to be somewhere in Europe.

"Second; Rhapsody Angel is still at large, and unless she has encountered the device that was utilised at the mine to split me into two beings, the aftermath of her attacks suggest she has assistance."

"That'll be Alice and Louise." Ossa muttered.

"You won't tell her this?" Lieutenant Green queried.

"I have been instructed to disturb her only with news of Rhapsody's capture." Black replied. "Third; the word "Utopia" may be of some use to you..."

Phoenixia nodded slowly. Black turned to leave.

"Perhaps after this we can conduct negotiations between us and the Mysterons in good faith." Colonel White said. Black paused.

"Perhaps. But I would not count upon it..." He struggled with his next sentence. "Good Luck, Earthmen..."

He left the room.

**oooo**

"According to Stansted control," Captain Buff reported, "Cloudbase has gone into a long, slow decent. They predict it will reach 2,000 metres at some point over southern England. Repeated attempts at communication have been ignored."

"Did you tell them it's been captured?" Blue asked. Buff shook his head.

"Didn't want to panic them. I told them to divert traffic around it, and stand by for further instructions."

Scarlet frowned at the map showing the carrier's course. "If I knew no better, I'd say Mesha was planning to bomb my home town..."

Michael smiled without humour. "Given the number of society members with some connection to Winchester, that wouldn't surprise me... On the other hand, Stonehenge is also on this route, and for reasons I can't go into, that's just as tempting a target." He looked up at Scarlet. "Dave tells me you've recaptured it from the Mysterons before..."

"With a lot of trained personnel, yes. With Blue, Myself, Buff and the rest of you... Unlikely to say the least..."

"What would it take to disable it?" Claire asked. The three Spectrum Captains looked at her like she had gone mad.

"Do you have four nuclear bombs in your pocket?" Blue asked.

"We don't, but Ben does." Michael said, sticking up for her.

Blue laughed humourlessly, taking this for a joke. Scarlet, who had seen Ben in battle, just looked soberly at them.

"Cloudbase is built to take punishment. Once, a fuel tanker exploded on the deck. She crash-dived into the ocean to put out the fire, surfaced and took off again. All inside of an hour." he said, with a note of bitter pride that this had become such a stumbling block. "Everything that moves within 500 miles, be it children's kite or spacecraft is tracked, and any hostile craft will be shot down by the missile racks."

"Right..." Michael replied.

Claire looked over at where Dave was sitting. "Keep your thinking cap on baby, I'll just try something..."

She walked over to the depressed society agent. Asuka sat next to him, her head against his leg, trying to impart some comfort to him.

"Dave, I need to know something about this fandom." she said.

"What mortal draws me back by these weary ways?" Dave replied, in a grim attempt to be funny. "Long have I been dead..."

"Sorry?"

"You're right. Norse prophetess I'm not..."

"Nor are you dead!"

Dave looked up at Claire. "I hate to disappoint you, but do you see that pile of stones over there?" he asked, pointing. "My body is under that little lot, the thickness of a piece of paper, and no force of any universe can ever make it's bones support weight again. I'm just some puppet brought back to mess with people's emotions that happened to find a means of cutting my strings." He smiled slightly. "Now there's an ironic sentence, given where we are..."

"Another thing you're not is Marvin the paranoid android!" Claire put in. "So stop being so gloomy. We need a way to get onto Cloudbase. Is there a way to evade the detectors?"

"Probably not..." Dave was still depressed, but thinking about the problem at least.

"You know more about this fandom than any of us." Miri put in. "And more besides, what about that square root twenty nine thing?"

"I don't know if that's right or not." Dave replied, "I just got it from an episode of..." he stopped in mid-sentence, his eyes widening and a smile slowly spreading over his face.

"Is that an idea brewing?" Claire asked. Dave didn't answer. He leapt to his feet, and set off towards Martha with the girls and Asuka in hot pursuit. Drake spotted them and came running over to see what was going on.

Dave reached through Martha's shattered window and opened the glove compartment, pulling out a green snakeskin effect object.

"What's that? Drake asked.

"My glasses case..." Dave replied absently, putting his spectacles on and reaching for something else. This time he produced a device that looked very like a Poke Nav, save for the fact it was a luminous green. "Why didn't I think of this sooner?"

"I think I saw Emily working on that a few days ago." Miri observed. "She didn't say what it was though..."

"She called it a Guest Appearance." Dave explained, as the screen told him to "please wait". "Basically a less powerful version of the Crossover. It doesn't need to be as powerful, as it only brings out one character, but otherwise it works the same way."

"So it would let... a Power Ranger appear in... the Mummy for example?" Drake suggested. Dave nodded.

"So she said. But it's really useful in multi-fandom universes, like Star Trek or Doctor Who/Torchwood. There you wouldn't be limited to a single character."

"There's another fandom here we can use?" Claire asked.

"Yes. Captain Black used a Zero-X spacecraft to get to Mars in the first episode." Dave explained, "And it in turn made its first appearance in a film call-"

The Guest Appearance let out a shrill beeping noise to tell Dave it was ready, and he set to work selecting several options at once.

"Okay, we've got them for... four hours apparently. Shouldn't need that long..."

"Who's they?" Claire asked, slightly apprehensively. Dave just pressed a large button in the centre. An eye achingly bright pink beam shot into the sky.

All four humans and the Pokemon yelped and tried to blink their eyes clear of the flashy lights on their retinas.

"Owwwwie..."

"Luxray ray!"

"Sorry, sorry." Dave said. "Didn't know it was going to do that..."

"What happened?" Michael called, running over with Scarlet in tow. Before Claire or anyone else could explain, Scarlet's lapels started to flash on and off. Scarlet listened to the voice in his ears in blank astonishment for a moment before unfurling the mouth mic and replying.

"Who is this? And how did you get this frequency?" There was a pause as he listened to the response. "I see. Sorry I was sharp with you. The situation on the ground seems to have passed, but there is a further matter you could assist us with..."

Further conversation was drowned out by the approaching noise of several very loud jet engines. Two large aircraft came into view through the clouds.

"Luxray Lux Lux RAY!" Asuka shouted jubilantly, as both craft triggered their vertical jets and came in to land nearby.

**oooo**

"All seems to be proceeding as we planned." The man in the shadows said to Mesha, via the Cloudbase communications equipment, now upgraded with Multiversal roaming.

"It's going very well." Mesha confirmed. "So well, I don't think I need you any more."

"Oh?" The man seemed to be amused, rather than annoyed. "And what makes you think that?"

"Don't patronise me! You kept the Chameleon Arch we used to suppress my memories. I was dependant on you, and you made sure I knew it!"

Now her patron frowned. "Well, if that's what you choose to believe..."

"Choose nothing, it's the truth!" Mesha replied. "I have an army waiting to obey my command, and the means to make as many of these Jem'hadar hybrid things as I like. With the retro-metabolic powers of the Mysterons, I can make them completely indestructible, and I can block the pitiful remains of the society ants from getting into a fandom to disturb me while I do unto Marlow what she would do to my kind."

The purple-haired Sue grinned. "Thanks where it's due _**Boss**_. I owe you enough to let you fade into obscurity again, but don't get in my way!" She signed off.

The man in the shadows sighed. "Great, the one time she calls me boss..."

"So we're finally rid of her?" Romani said, as if it was all too good to be true. "Yesssssssssss!" She punched the air.

The man shook his head. "Not quite. She has slipped her leash, and must be punished for that."

"She has no idea of how dependant that interference generator we gave her is on the external one outside the fandom, does she?"

"Well, at least _**that's**_ well defended..." the man said, quietly. Romani snorted, then finally burst out laughing, as her boss allowed himself a wintry smile under the shadows that covered his face...

**oooo**

"Other than the wild Pokemon in the trap floor in the first sub-basement," Major Detail reported. "the only sign of life in this base is a very bored looking Murkrow in the second sub-basement."

Marcus frowned. Granted, the Team Rocket HQ from the second generation Pokemon games was the ideal place to site a device that interfered with technology, there was no sign that there had been any sort of activity here since Team Rocket had abandoned the place. Emily was certain this was where the interference was being generated from however, so...

"Is the transmitter room active?" he asked.

"While the Murkrow permitted us to examine the door unmolested, we were unable to gain entry to ascertain this." Detail reported. "However, the noise from within implied so."

"Okay," Marcus said, "Tyler, bring your Pokemon and follow me. We'll get into this room and find out what's going on. Jared, you and the LPGB stay here on guard." he took out the Tiger Talisman again.

**oooo**

Harriet was pulled out of the cubby hole where she had been confined for the last hour or so. If the rest of the team had thought the Cloudbase Brig was cramped, they had no idea of the conditions the society leader had endured.

She was dragged roughly out, through an open airlock onto the runway deck of Cloudbase itself. At normal cruising height they should have needed oxygen to breathe, but Mesha had reduced the height so this was no longer necessary. It was still cold and windy though, not that it seemed to bother her or Captain Black.

"Do you know where we are?" Mesha asked, playfully.

"What happened to "We meet at last"?" Harriet asked. The clone behind her happened to be a Jem'hadar with a Heavy Bolter, and this remark earned her a blow to the back with the barrel of this weapon and knocked her down.

"We are now 2000 feet above Stonehenge." Mesha continued as if nothing had happened. "You see what I'm doing? I'm giving you exactly the same treatment you gave the rest of my kind. Stuffed in a Pandorica for a while, then executed at Stonehenge."

"Wha..." Harriet began, but the blow had winded her, and speaking was difficult.

"Pandorica." Mesha said, as if quoting a dictionary. "A prison or confinement cell constructed on a premise of legality that is in fact just blind hatred."

Harriet just looked blankly at her. Mesha rolled her eyes.

"A Dalek once said, "Only the Doctor can fly the Tardis", and yet those same Daleks knew of River Song, so they must have at least suspected she could do that. Thus, they knew that the Doctor was very likely not responsible for the cracks in time, yet they went along with the plan out of hatred for their greatest enemy. And in the face of that little incentive, were any of the Doctor's other enemies going to query that?"

"You're...from season three..." Harriet managed to say, breathlessly. "How...?"

"My father may be from Season Three, but I'm a Sue." Mesha replied. "I could spoiler Season Seven for you if I could be bothered."

"So...I'm avenging Dave, _and_ Steven Moffat." Harriet said, "Thanks for the motivation..."

Mesha glared at the Society Leader. "You don't care, do you?"

"I care about the fandoms you and the rest of the Sues have ruined in your quest for perfection." Harriet spat, standing up again.

"You care about whether it makes good entertainment for you?" Mesha exclaimed. "And you call us Self-centred!"

"As opposed to the perfect altruism you're practising right now?" Harriet pointed out mildly.

"And you'd know all about that, wouldn't you? Saint Foxblade, the perfect Mary-Sue. So nauseating, she made the rest of us sick. The perfect excuse to start this war of yours!"

"I did not-"

"Oh don't even try to deny it! If you wanted anything other than a war, you'd be trying to reform as many Sues as possible. How many have you reformed? Bella, who was an oddball to begin with, and Palm Tree, who you created in the first place. A token effort! The way the library was arranged the day Bella arrived, I was in the next room when Adrian made his little speech about reforming Sues not just punishing them. If the demeanour of the agents I met on subsequent days was anything to go by, they were silently accusing him of blasphemy! Soon afterwards, he's conveniently killed in action. Am I honestly supposed to believe that is a coincidence?"

Harriet was speechless as Mesha came closer still and spoke directly to her face.

"What about _**your**_ quest for perfection?" she whispered, "You didn't try very hard to save Dave, did you? Was he starting to sympathise with us? That isn't perfect by your standards, so you take the opportunity to get rid of him."

"You really believe we'd..." Harriet would have laughed, if it hadn't been apparent that Mesha did believe it.

"Oh, you would." Mesha said. "I know you've turned on your own people before. Adrian, Benjamin..." She grinned nastily. "Why else would so many people leave your society for no apparent reason?"

Harriet had had all she could take of this, and brought around her leg in a kick-boxing movement, aiming for Mesha's head. Being a Sue however, she was already a metre or so away, and grinning like a mad woman. All Harriet had done was make her injured ribs hurt.

"Oh." Mesha goaded. "You want to fight? Very well."

The society leader was presented with her own confiscated cricket bat by a clone, and looked at it for a while.

"Alright... Bring It!"

**oooo**

Alice poked her head around the corner, her goggles set to to X-ray setting in the absence of a Mysteron detector. A skeleton turned to face her and she ducked back as the shot it fired struck the corridor wall.

"Two non-coms, Three Mysterons." She said, distinguishing Louise from Rhapsody by the Angel's slender skeleton.

Louise, now armed with a hand phaser taken from a clone in addition to her own pistol, stepped forward, and after about ten seconds of cautious fire was able to stun both of the non-commissioned Spectrum Agents. This left the Mysteronised clones, which Rhapsody was able to deal with in pretty short order.

After several battles in the corridors of Cloudbase, the girls had found a modulation of their "borrowed" phaser rifle that could induce enough of a system shock to be equivalent to a major electric attack. This did however, have the side-effect of draining the weapon's power pack pretty quickly, and the Angel was thankful when the last replicant guarding the brig got too close to Alice and was brought down by a blade to the stomach.

Rhapsody set to work deciphering the changed code of the brig door, while Alice set her goggles back to something that would allow her to actually see the world instead of through it. She settled on a dark filter that would stop her epilepsy triggering if another firefight brewed up unexpectedly.

It wasn't quite dark enough for her not to notice the curious look on Louise's face.

"Problem?" she asked, apprehensively. Louise shrugged.

"These things," She said, gesturing to the Jem'hadar trooper they had brought down in the attack. "I don't think they're entirely Jem'hadar. They don't have any White feeder tubes in their necks, they're way more muscular, and I'm certain their blood is the wrong colour."

"But we can take them down easy enough, right?"

"These ones are vulnerable to electricity, so we should be okay." Louise replied. "I'm just worried that there might be some unreplicated ones around somewhere... They'd be much harder to deal with."

"So that's not what the Mysterons really look like?" Rhapsody asked over her shoulder. The door lock beeped it's displeasure. She could almost picture it thumbing it's nose at her, and lost patience.

"Oh, stuff this!" She said, in a distinctly London accent, and shot the panel. The door jerked spasmodically, opened and shut like a guillotine several times, then fell still in a half-open position.

"What kept you?" came Phoenixia's distorted voice as they effected an entry. "The code's one, one, zero, three by the way."

Rhapsody blinked, shrugged, and tried the code. The lock to the inner cell was duly released.

"How did you know that?" Ochre asked, as everyone filed out. Phoenixia shrugged.

"Black's clue. Eleventh episode of the third season of Doctor Who, "Utopia". Mesha's Dad's address, effectively. Now lets get our weapons back!"

"Right..." Ochre said. "Now I'm even more lost..."

**oooo**

"Murkrow?" The Murkrow asked, confused, as at this point in the game's continuity, Tyler's Grovyle and Emotion Marcus's Kirlia hadn't been discovered yet. Of course, Thought Marcus couldn't speak Pokemonese.

"Never m-m-mind that n-n-now." he said, bending down to the Murkrow's level. "D-d-o you know h-h-how to get in th-th-there?"

Murkrow cocked it's head and pecked at the society badge on his coat. Thought Marcus brought it out into the light, so it could see it better. Deciding the ID was in order, the Murkrow turned to the door and cleared its throat.

"GET OUT OF MY SIGHT YOU SELF-INTERESTED PSEUDO-ANGELS!"

Three thoughts crossed Thought Marcus's mind as the voice recognition module opened the door. The first was, What does that mean? The second; Why was that voice Tash's? The third (Which rapidly overtook the other two, for good reason); That Electrode is larger than average...

The aforementioned Electrode grinned, waggled it's eyebrows at them, then began to glow white.

"Oh Muffins..." said Tyler.

**To Be Continued...**

And there we have it! Next and finally, I'll tie up most of the loose ends. By the Way, anyone who can guess what Asuka said as the aircraft landed... is as much of a geek as I am.

I'd like to think nothing's wrong at this late stage, but if it is, do let me know. Later fans!


	5. Chapter 5

Here we are! The moment you've all been waiting for! The last chapter of my longest fic to date on this site.

I own nothing but my two characters, and thank everyone for letting me borrow theirs. Thanks especially to Gerry Anderson, and I suppose Satoshi Tajari as well, given the opening...

*Is deafened by cries of Get On With It!* Okay, okay. Enjoy!

**

* * *

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**Surprise surprise...**

As the smoke cleared, there was no sign of the society team in the Team Rocket base. The Electrode duly vanished off to wherever fainted Pokemon go in the games, and all was silent.

That was, until Emotion Marcus's Kirlia appeared as if from nowhere, looked around a bit, then vanished from whence it came. A few more seconds passed, then it reappeared, with Thought Marcus's Kadabra, Murkrow, Tyler and his Grovyle, and both Marcus' in tow, now they were sure it was safe.

"Well," Tyler said. "That was unexpected..."

"ONE OF US SHOULD HAVE BROUGHT A POILWHIRL." Emotion Marcus put in. He was thinking of the "Damp" ability.

"Ab-b-bilities don't work in th-th-this generation." Thought Marcus reminded him.

Murkrow flapped off, having had enough for one day, and not even the detachment of LPGB that tried to arrest him as a soviet spy on the way out could stop him.

A quick search of the transmitter room determined that whatever had been broadcasting the interference had been blown to scrap by Electrode, along with their answers. Charis eventually reported that she would be able to get the plotholes working again inside of an hour, possibly faster. No-one however, had any explanation for why Mesha had made her own life so difficult by not defending this installation. It was eventually put down to Sueish over-confidence.

**oooo**

It was becoming clear to the Society Leader that Mesha was just toying with her. She had yet to draw her sword, and was merely using her arms to block the swings of Harriet's Cricket bat. She decided to call the Sue's bluff, and fell back, waiting for her to make the next move. Mesha pouted in mock disappointment.

"Had enough already?" she said, the bruises practically falling off her arms as she spoke. She drew her sword. "Too bad, because I haven't!"

Mesha swung her sword, using the magical abilities she had forged into it in the Slayers fandom to fling a wave of Blue-green energy at Harriet. The society leader pictured herself at the Rosebowl in Hampshire, and promptly hit it for a six. Mesha responded with another wave, and another.

"Miss Yana..." Captain Black put in. "There is a-"

"Whatever it is, deal with it!" Mesha snapped. "I'm busy!"

Black smiled quietly to himself. That vague instruction gave him the necessary loophole to make life easier for the escaped society agents. He gave orders into his communicator.

**oooo**

"If it was any easier, it would be a shooting gallery." Captain Grey commented, as he downed another cleaner.

It was true, the number of clones Mesha had brought with her were nothing if they were dispatched piecemeal. This of course, was exactly what Black had done. By encountering them in two's and three's, they were a lot easier to defeat. Not that there weren't a few nasty moments though...

As if to prove the point, the sloping access way that led to the control cabin of the Spectrum headquarters was suddenly filled with bright Promethium flame. One of the Jem'hadar devastators was armed with a heavy flamer.

The team navigating their way up to the bridge were forced back into cover as the jet scorched past, setting off the fire defences and filling the air with a cool Halon gas that restricted visibility. It restricted the range and spread of the clone's own weapon as well however, so Symphony Angel was able to get close enough to take him out with a well-aimed shot from an Electrode Rifle.

Colonel White looked back at the rest of the Team assaulting the Bridge, which consisted of Rhia, Ingrid and Lieutenant Green, and saw the girls loading their weapons with Copyright Darts to bring the non-coms to their senses.

"Everyone ready?" He received an affirmative nod. "Right, then lets get up there and vent this gas before we suffocate!"

**oooo**

Heading for the wheelhouse were Alice, Louise, Wille, Two Angels (Rhapsody and Harmony) and Captains Magenta and Ochre. Their problem was the Jem'hadar scout clones, which were the ones with the personal cloaking abilities, more than making up for their light armour and lack of any weaponry more advanced than knives and pistols.

The major advantage they had against them was Alice's goggles, now set on X-ray again, which picked them up wherever they were hiding. For the second time in as many minutes, Alice stabbed thin air and was rewarded with a reptilian gurgling noise as the trooper faded back into visibility.

It was at this point that a pair of cleaner clones came up behind the team in the corridor and tried to ambush Captain Magenta. A bad move by anyone's standards, as although he couldn't bring his rifle around in time to deal with the nearest one, the knife (Which was NOT Spectrum issue) in the former crime boss's left hand found the offending clone's eyes and disabled him long enough for Wille to use his Hellfire on him. His partner, attempting to retreat, was unsuccessful in doing so...

Ochre meanwhile was exchanging fire with another cleaner, further down the corridor, and eventually struck the man's weapon. With an impressive reaction time for someone with a burnt arm, the trooper pulled out a combat blade and lunged at the nearest enemy, which happened to be Harmony Angel. With her black belt (Fourth Dan) it was no contest, and he was probably relieved when Alice dealt with him a few seconds later.

That done, Alice stole ahead to the wheelhouse door so the goggles could see through it. She looked for a moment, then said something in sign language back to Louise.

"Three people in there, only one clone." She translated.

"Twelve..." muttered Ochre, who was keeping score. "She must be running out of them by now..."

**oooo**

Aside from the ten clones or so that Mesha had with her on the deck of Cloudbase, most of the rest of them were guarding the deck access corridor that Phoenixia, Tom, Pete, Ossa, Aimee, Jamie and the remaining Angels (Destiny and Melody) were trying to traverse.

The blizzard of fire that was shrieking towards their position was suddenly stilled for a second to allow a ravening blast of thermal energy to gush forth from another devastator, this time armed with a Multi-Melta.

Phoenixia threw herself against Destiny Angel and pressed her into the wall as the blast passed them, earning her a French expletive in her left ear, and a sudden feeling of being roasted alive on her back, accompanied by the smell of charred fabric.

"Damn it, I liked this outfit..." She muttered, mentally directing her healing abilities at her injuries and aiming a Incandescent Silverreign pistol at the nearest clone.

Melody sank into a firing crouch with a dropped Phaser Rifle and aimed a series of placed shots at the heavy weapon. Two cleaners fell to the deck, but the Jem'hadar was a cagey opponent, lurking at the back of the pack. This was when Tom, by pure chance and at extreme range, managed to put a Tungsten cored Bullet into the Multi-Melta itself.

The resulting high-pitched whine from the weapon gave those agents that were close in to the group the opportunity to dash back into cover before it blew itself out of existence with a deafening roar.

Melody Angel covered her ears and grimaced in pain as blood dripped through her hands. Any advantage the surviving clones hoped to gain from her vulnerability was swiftly blown away by Ossa and Pete as they closed once more and took care of them.

Waiting for a few seconds while her burns healed Phoenixia heard a crackling noise from her Communicator. She smiled as she began to make out Emily's voice.

**oooo**

"That sounds hopeful." Rhia remarked, as she became aware of the same thing. "Emily this is Rhia, can you hear me?"

The bridge was secure now, and the Spectrum portion of the team were regaining control of the affected systems. With little left to do save make sure Canon characters weren't killed late in the game, she could afford to focus on this for a while.

"Juzzzzzarely." came Emily's voice, through the crackling. "Michael and the rest are on their way now, and you wonzzzzzzz..." The signal degraded again, but Rhia had heard enough. Alice and Louise returned from the Wheelhouse at this point.

"Green? Are there any aircraft that look like they're on an intercept course? I'm told some reinforcements are on their way now."

"Got one." Green came back after a second. "Approaching from the west, height 30,000 feet and descending. Speed..." he paused and stared at his instruments in disbelief. "...Seven point five thousand miles per hour?"

"Lets see it." Colonel White said, thoughtfully. Green brought the image up on the screen. Alice and Louise's eyes widened.

"Is that...? No way!" Alice spluttered.

**oooo**

Harriet realised something was up when the clones that had up to this point been watching and waiting for Mesha's orders, abruptly looked back at the airlock she had been brought through and shifted to combat stances. If Mesha was aware of this, she gave no sign, but continued to throw blasts of blue-green magic at her, which the society leader duly deflected in short order.

She began to wonder if Mesha was trying to keep her at arms length because she was useless at close combat. She grinned as her mental tally of her score passed 100 runs.

"That's a Century for me!" she taunted. Mesha responded with a menacing smile and threw an especially large blast that sent her skidding backwards a full three feet as she batted it away. That had happened quite a lot during the course of this battle...

As the society team emerged onto the deck, Ossa was the first to spot Harriet's predicament.

"Hati! Behind you!" she yelled.

The society leader chanced a quick look over her shoulder. "There's nothing behind meeeeeee!" Harriet suddenly felt the deck slope away behind her under her feet. Mesha grinned.

"That's the point." She said, and with an expansive gesture, fired the widest blast at her yet.

Harriet swung the cricket bat for the last time, and promptly lost her balance.

"Oh Knickers!" she squawked with surprising politeness as she fell out of sight.

**Da-Da-Daa, Da-Da-Da-Daaa!**

Something struck the aircraft's wing with a clang.

"Gotcha!" said Captain Scarlet, not bothering to conceal his relief. Dave too let out the breath he'd been holding in.

"Too close... Far too close..." He muttered. He looked up at the pilot. "Okay Scott. Lets get up there and really give them something to think about!"

The pilot nodded, and manipulated his two control sticks.

**oooo**

Mesha's grin became diabolical as she watched Harriet fall out of sight. If she had calculated it right, (and of course she had, she was perfect!) the society leader would land directly on top of the largest stone at Stonehenge. Once part of a great Trilithon, it had a nasty knob on top that had initially held the lintel on. That was bound to cause a mess.

Only a Sue could have heard the clang Harriet made by hitting the aircraft's wing over the cries of outraged abuse from the remainder of the society, so Mesha heard it alright, and the grin flickered, then vanished as the aircraft rose into view beyond the edge of the Cloudbase deck.

Presenting its left side to the gob-smacked onlookers meant that Harriet Marlow was clearly visible, clinging to the leading edge of the wing, her face a strange mixture of "Am I alive?" and "This is almost fun".

As the silver-grey aircraft turned its red nose cone towards Mesha with the air of a disappointed schoolmaster turning to rebuke a child that had just thrown something at him, it was the word written down the underside of the fuselage that caught every eye.

Thunderbird.

And beneath that, on a blue piece of hull, the number one.

Mesha's remaining Devastators were armed with a Missile Launcher, Plasma Cannon, and Heavy Bolter, and while the one with the Bolter was too busy with suppressing fire in the direction of the society, the others opened up on the giant craft.

Harriet squawked, and buried her face in the Thunderbird's wing as a Frag (anti-infantry) Missile glanced off the hull and spun off into space not three metres from her. Faced with a direct assault, Scott Tracy responded in kind, and the air was suddenly filled with the chatter of machine cannon fire.

The resulting detonation of the Plasma Cannon created a large sphere of super-heated matter that atomised it's bearer and the Missile Trooper, burnt three cleaners to the point they couldn't lift their weapons any more, and cooked off a fuel storage tank on the deck below which knocked almost all the combatants on the deck over with the shockwave.

The Thunderbird lowered itself until Harriet was able to slide over the back of the wing and drop down to the deck (unhurt, but without much grace). As she did so, the hatch underneath opened as well, and a figure dropped out, to the astonishment of all present.

Dave landed on his feet, with his right fist planted into the deck in what he no-doubt thought was a heroic pose. This was slightly undermined by the loud snap of breaking bone that accompanied his landing.

"Ow!" he said simply. "Remind me never to do that again." He stood up, and a flash of green light next to his injured ankle signified that it had healed, but he still favoured it for a few steps as he walked towards Mesha.

"Mesha Alicia Maria Susan Maylene Violet Abigail Yana." he said, "You are under arrest for fandom manipulation, creation and maintenance of an army with the intent of further counts of the same, killing m- Oh Bog!" He snapped, as Bolter shells detonated around him, some_** in**_ him. "Scott, if you wouldn't mind?" he added into a Radio Microphone in his hand.

The words, "Don't bother big brother, I've got him." reached his ears and Mesha's. The last of the Jem'hadar was suddenly propelled rapidly forwards by a missile that had struck him in the small of the back. The unfortunate clone kept moving until he was pushed from Cloudbase's deck by the rocket's force.

"Thanks Virgil." Dave said into the microphone as the blood drained away from his clothes back into him. "But I bet you couldn't do that again if you tried!"

"Not sure I'd want to." Came the younger Tracy's voice as Thunderbird 2, minus it's pod, rose above the cloud it had been hiding in, it's missile launcher smoking. Several harnesses dropped from a lower hatch, each holding a society member. At the same time, a spluttering and sparking, but relatively stable plothole opened, and several other agents came through until almost the whole society were standing on the deck of Cloudbase.

"This endeavour is no longer viable, Miss Yana." Captain Black put in, not without a certain snigger in his voice. "I am instructed to retreat. I urge you to do the same." And without further ado, he leapt from the carrier and was gone.

"Where was I?" Dave muttered, distracted. "...army, fandom manip..., Oh yeah! Killing me several times, traumatising my Luxray, and wilful deception of a society parole board." He paused. "Have I missed anything?"

"Embedding my Cricket Bat six feet in the ground in the middle of Stonehenge?" Harriet suggested. She wasn't sure whether to trust him yet, but was willing to go along with this. Dave clicked his fingers, or more accurately speaking, tried and failed to.

"Thank you Madam Society Leader." he replied, glaring at his fingers in annoyance. "Wilful destruction of Society property!" Harriet frowned. That didn't sound as good.

Mesha blinked several times.

"But... You turned. You didn't want to be part of it. You never did..."

"That may possibly be true..." Dave sighed quietly. "But its less a matter of wanting to be a part of the society, and more a matter of needing to be."

"Yeah right." Mesha retorted viciously. "You're just another Nazi out to destroy us after all!"

"Yeah, about that." Dave said, "Did you really think someone with an Archaeology and History degree wouldn't see the potential for that to happen? Or at least," he swiftly amended, in deference to the incredulous looks he was getting. "that it could be interpreted like that by cynics such as myself?"

It would be fair to say he had everyone's attention now, and took full advantage of that fact.

"That's one of my reasons for joining the society I didn't put on my entrance form. I joined as a voice of reason, to reign people in before they got vilified for trying to do a good thing the wrong way. Thing is, to do that, I needed some kind of proof that Sues could be reformed, that it was possible to save them from themselves. Emily, Lily, and you, so I thought...And then, just to put the cherry on it, you go and make the very thing you're so afraid of more and more likely!"

"What?" shrieked Mesha. "How do you work that out?"

"Think about it." Dave said, his voice dangerously quiet. "What have you done to prevent a war of mass extermination? I'll tell you. You went and proved the opposite point! If you go around betraying those who would help you and trying to kill anyone who gets in your way, then you're only going to prove in the minds of others that extermination may be a worthwhile course of action! Which only makes my job, and yours for that matter, a lot harder."

"DON'T PRETEND YOU HAVEN'T MURDERED YOUR SHARE!" Mesha howled, "FORGETTING ABOUT KIMBERLY AND HENRIETTA ALREADY ARE WE?"

"Who?" Dave said, suddenly confused.

"I think those were the Sues in Primeval at the same time she was." Michael put in. "You know, the ones Helen Cutter killed and left for the scav-"

"LIAR!" Mesha roared, launching a massive wave of blue-green magic at him. It missed, and dispersed harmlessly over southern England. "YOU MURDERED THEM! JUST LIKE YOU ENGINEERED THE OTHER'S DEATHS WHEN YOUR PANDORICA GOT TOO FULL!"

"No, Willowe set them loose..." Valerie said, wincing from Mesha's rage.

"LIAR!" Mesha shrieked again, clapping her hands to her head as if it were about to burst open.

"If you were perfect," Dave said slowly, "You'd know we weren't lying..."

Mesha considered this for a moment, but before she could respond, two things happened in quick succession.

First, the Archangel Necklace, which had been glowing brighter and getting progressively hotter to the touch for the last few minutes without anyone (not even Mesha) noticing, blew a fuse with a spectacular bang and began to spit sparks.

Second, a bright flash of light lanced out from a point just in front of where the Angel aircraft sat at ready launch position and shot Mesha in the back.

Many eyes turned to the source, and found a woman with red hair and dressed in a Dark Red coloured Spectrum uniform holding a bow, from which she had just launched the arrow now sticking out of Mesha's back. In all the excitement, they'd forgotten all about Captain Burgundy.

"You dropped this Marlow." she said, throwing Harriet's cricket bat into the crowd. Then, with a flash of emerald light, she was gone.

Mesha collapsed with a gasp. The arrow was crackling with electricity, and had gone fairly deep into her back, but it was still a minor wound as far as a Sue was concerned. So it was a surprise when Mesha apparently couldn't heal herself, even when the arrow vanished, calmly and without fuss, a second later.

Valerie swiftly cleared everyone away from where she was lying, muttering deliriously to herself, and began trying to heal her, with little success.

"R-romani... No...It can't...they...He tricked me..."

"Mesha." Dave said, kneeling down next to her. "Where's that pellet thing? You'll have to regenerate."

"Not...working...Why can't I...?...He lied!" she spat, with unexpected venom. "He...used...me..."

"I'm loosing her!" Valerie said, quite calmly under the circumstances.

"Who did?" Dave put in. Mesha gave him a glazed look that was supposed to be a glare. She didn't have long left...

"Mesha, you owe me." Dave insisted, presenting his right hand. The burn he had sustained saving her life in Primeval had long since faded, but she understood. Her voice was so quiet, only Dave and Valerie heard her at all.

"Storm...herald..."

With that, Mesha Alicia Maria Susan Maylene Violet Abigail Yana collapsed with a sigh, and immediately decomposed into a cloud of purple glittering particles that spiralled away on the wind, dispersing over the Captain Scarlet fandom until none were visible to the naked eye.

**oooo**

The man in the shadows watched this, then closed his eyes as a mark of respect.

"Like father, like daughter..." the man called Stormherald said quietly. "May you find redemption for the crimes you committed in another time..."

**oooo**

"Captain Burgundy, or Romani as Mesha called her, was never a Sue." Phoenixia said. "Looking back at all the readings we got from her proved it conclusively. The bracelet she left behind on Harriet's cricket bat was a highly advanced Suergy generator."

The senior society members present at this emergency meeting in Adrian's office looked at each other in some surprise.

"I thought there was a way to tell the difference?" Valerie put in, recalling her own experiences in the Heroes fandom. Phoenixia sighed.

"Usually yes, and this thing could allow for that, seeming to be real unless you knew exactly what you were looking for. Which we didn't at the time."

"So to the untrained eye, my cricket bat was a Sue briefly?" Harriet asked, faintly amused by the idea. "Interesting concept..."

"Speaking of Sues," Adrian put in, "I think mine was a deliberate distraction." He was tired and worn from battling her for an extended period.

"She wasn't all that hard to get the measure of." he explained, "Problem was, she deliberately fought with the intention of keeping me occupied as long as possible, so I very seldom got to grips with her." He frowned deeply before continuing. "Of course, I couldn't just leave her running around in there, so I had to keep fighting. Eventually she received a message from an unknown point in the multiverse and bailed out of the fandom as soon as she could."

"What message?" Michael asked.

By way of response, Adrian turned in his chair and brought up a picture on a screen behind him. This was what had appeared on the Zord's screens, and those of the Sue's Evangelion. A stick man, holding a flag aloft, bearing a stylised thundercloud on its fabric. Valerie gasped.

"Stormherald!"

Adrian nodded. He'd come to the same conclusion.

"Why do I get the feeling Mesha wasn't the real threat?" Harriet muttered.

"Well, if we turn to questions we _**can**_ answer for the time being..." Tash said, over her neck brace. She wouldn't need it for longer than a few days thanks to Alan Tracy and the medical supplies in Thunderbird 2's pod (that Virgil had left at the mine), but trying to glomp him immediately after she regained conciousness hadn't helped it. "These Star Trek lizard men. What can you tell us about them Val?"

Valerie frowned. "Louise was right, they aren't all Jem'hadar. They have genes for Klingon redundant organs, which have been modified to produce an organic substitute for Ketracel-White, and Gorn gene sequences that allow them to regenerate lost limbs in a matter of days if they're severed... Basically speaking, they have all the strengths and few if any of the weaknesses."

Michael grimaced. Project Warpath was looking more useful by the minute...

"And Dave?" Adrian asked. There was a brief silence.

"Well," Valerie said at last. "There aren't any sleeper programs in his head, we know that much..."

"Good." Again, silence.

"He did raise some fair points." the healer eventually continued, "What we do can look, to an ill-informed outside observer, like ethnic cleansing. Look at Tash and Harriet's experiences with Lisa. She was convinced to the point of self-delusion that we had murdered her boyfriend. Dave's right. We're going to have to do some major public relations work if we don't want any more like her or Mesha."

Phoenixia frowned to herself as she thought of something else, and made a mental note to Email Mesha's author later.

"If anyone's worried about Dave turning traitor," Tash said, "on his suggestion, Asuka is staying close to him in case of an emergency. Although I don't think she really expects to have to do anything if she was that cut up about stopping him before."

"Would she be able to do anything anyway?" Adrian asked, "He survived it last time."

"Since he's left the fandom, there isn't a ready source of retro-metabolic energy to super-charge that ability." Valerie explained, "An electric attack like Thunder Fang should do it... if it has to. But I don't think he's any immediate threat to anyone save himself. He's still depressed. I'm going to run a few more tests to see if I can find out what his nightmares were about so I can help on that front though."

"Any ideas on how the psychic paper got into the library?" Tash asked.

"Well, logically," Michael began, then he stopped and knocked on the side of his head with a fist. "Shut up in there! I do know what logic is! Anyway, it could only have been planted at four points in the past year, assuming Mesha or her allies were involved somehow. One; Mesha's abduction from the library."

"That's a no." Phoenixia interrupted. "I've already checked that."

"Two;" Michael went on, "Rhia's abduction, when (a) turned off the security cameras. Or three; when the Doctor Who villains were running around the library and we had to do the same thing to stop the Weeping Angels..." His face darkened with the memory.

"Unlikely coincidence as the last one is, the plothole sensors were still running while the cameras were off both times, and there were no anomalies." Phoenixia paused. "Besides, the collection of psychic paperwork would need time to cross-breed and develop, so my bet would be during the chaos of the battle of the library."

Michael nodded. "That was option four."

"All very well and good, but how do we get rid of it?" Tash put in again.

"Well," Adrian said, "there is an event in the Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy fandom that disperses telepathic power. If we open a few plotholes to that point at strategic places in the library, the telepathic signal should be diffused harmlessly."

"Mesha didn't know it had been planted at all." Valerie said suddenly. "When I confronted her before, she didn't have a clue what I was talking about..."

"Again we're back to this Stormherald person..." Harriet said, "What kind of a name is that anyway?"

"We know he's male." Phoenixia began, "He's not a Gary-Stu, and he's good with technology. His name might indicate that he's from the Doctor Who fandom like Mesha was. "The Oncoming Storm", as in the Doctor."

"So he's comparing us to the Dalek's." Tash said. "Blindly hating and exterminating anything that doesn't fit with our world-view. Or at least, that's the front he choose to portray to Mesha..."

"We need more information..." Adrian sighed, unaware that elsewhere in the library, Jared was granting this wish.

**oooo**

He was studying the remains of Mesha's Archangel Necklace and Counts-As-Pellet, and he was confused.

The Necklace was designed to direct a lot of its power inwards towards Mesha, controlling her as much as it protected her. That wasn't the biggest surprise though...

He ran another scan to check his suspicion, and was just about to write it off as an attack of paranoia, when the scanning programme he'd borrowed from the Star Trek fandom displayed the last thing he'd expected.

He double checked it. Same result.

Another chip in the same device. Different result, but only by 00000000000000000.1 or something stupid like that.

Chloe's entrance to the lab and her request to borrow a tool went unheard as he stared at the screen.

"Chloe..." he said, remarkably calmly. "Can you look at this for me?"

"Sure. What are you doing exactly?" she asked, coming over to him.

"I was looking at the gadgets that were brought in from Captain Scarlet. Mesha's I mean. I guessed they might work along similar lines to some of ours, but..." he stopped and thought. "The circuit diagram of the Archangel Necklace is _**derived from**_ a miniaturised version of the society S.E.P field. Its far too similar to be a coincidence. The same goes for the C.A.P and the Guest Appearance."

"That's impossible!" said Chloe. Those gadgets hadn't even been thought of when Mesha first used hers. The very idea was laughable.

"I know, but I ran this quantum dating program through the scanner, just to check it. That's what I don't quite believe..." He let Chloe look over the data. Her jaw dropped, as he knew it would.

"Minus...This is relative to time here in the library, right?" she asked, uncertainly.

Jared nodded. "I'll run some more tests before I show this to a leader, but the way it looks now... Relative to us here and now, some of the stuff in these circuits was synthesised between 2020 and 2025. Ten to Fifteen years in the future..."

**oooo**

_A tunnel of cloud, occasionally lit by flashes of lightning. A figure strode through the chaos, along a road that didn't exist. _

_A hole formed in the clouds, showing a scene._

_The woman had a pair of brown fox ears sticking through her dark red hair, and two long brown tails with red points wound their way out of her outfit. She was beautiful, bleeding, and slowly vanishing into thin air._

"_I guess this... is as far as I go...My Storm Angel..." She said, as she faded from sight completely. _

_The man strode on. His fists tightening. _

_Another hole in the passageway showed him himself, fighting alongside this woman, as did the next three. That had happened a lot in the last few years..._

_Another hole. Another time._

_A group of Gary-Stu's, gloating over their latest cruelty. A bright white beam shot through a plothole, down through a red sky and struck Stonehenge. The high, evil laughter turned to surprise, then astonishment, then uneasy apprehension as a dome of red and black light expanded from the circle and began to twist the landscape into shapes only possible in fiction. _

_More images. _

_Tash, now about thirty, standing in front of the Counter Guardians, yelling at the top of her voice and pointing at the door, a crystal encased Adrian sleeping serenely through the whole scene. _

_A black haired Mary-Sue, standing over Dave, her sword pinning him to the ground by his stomach. His mouth wide in a roar of rage as he gripped the hilt tightly, denying her its use. _

_Emily, fifteen now, stumbling through the rubble of a destroyed city, supporting a cut and bleeding Harriet, who obviously didn't have much more time left on this earth. _

_Several W.A.R.G.S stood around a grave, more than one was missing..._

_Mesha Yana, exchanging blows with Silri in the Heroes fandom. She suddenly noticed Valerie emerging from a plothole, flash stepped over to her, and coldly slid her sword through the healer's heart. _

"_Mind your own business, Society Ant!" she said, pushing her back into the closing plothole with a contemptuous flourish as Kuroneko arrived too late to help... _

"_They Betrayed us..." The figure muttered to himself. "I can't let it happen again!"_

_Tash and Willowe trading blows over the Sahara Desert... Ben and Neb fighting in the tunnels... Chi and Xavier in the Yu-Gi-Oh Abridged fandom..._

"_Ah. Here's my stop!"_

_Six wings, so black that light seemed to just fall into them and get lost, erupted from the figure's back. He flew on the stormy wings up to a point in the cloud funnel, jinking almost contemptuously around the lightning that spluttered around him. _

"_Shadow Ignite!"_

_A black sword blade emerged from an object in his hand. He swung it to connect with the cloud funnel, and opened a great gash in its side. The length of tunnel that the figure had walked through began to disperse like windblown smoke..._

**oooo**

Dave woke up, alert but far from scared.

"Boss?"

He looked over to the rug in the centre of his room, where Asuka had now taken up semi-permanent residence. As he flipped on his bedside light, it picked out the metal of the translation collar he had found in the same storage area of his imagination as Martha. It was designed for a Flareon initially, so it was ill-fitting and occasionally rendered her language into a series of clicks and squeaks, but since she was sticking around for a while, it would do the job.

"Another nightmare?" Asuka asked, putting her front paws on the bed next to him. "But Val said you wouldn't CLICK WARBLE SQUEEEEEEEEE." The Luxray grimaced as the collar disgraced itself.

"Not a nightmare." Dave said, ruffling her mane affectionately. "It was disturbing, but..." He wasn't sure how to describe what he could remember of it, and gave up. His head diverted into other thoughts.

It was strange. He had expected to feel different.

He literally wasn't himself any more. He was a replica, a perfect replica of Dave. So perfect he didn't know where "Proper Dave" ended and the new him, "Other Dave", began...

To Asuka's Luxray-vision, or Alice's goggles, he was a Dave-shaped blur. The other agents seemed to avoid him, giving him mistrustful glares in passing. Or was that just him being cynical?

_What do I have to worry about? I'm indestructible!_ He thought, clenching a fist in front of his face. _Electricity and Old Age are the only things that can kill me, and Valerie isn't even sure about that last one yet! Maybe now is the time. Maybe now I can finally show those serene little-_

He terminated that line of thought in something approaching disgust.

"Penny for them...?" Asuka asked, in a slightly strained voice. Dave abruptly realised he had very nearly torn a clump of her fur out by clenching the hand that had been stroking her.

The Society Agent sighed and flopped back on his bed. "Wonderful... I turn on my friends and try to kill them...Mesha's patron has it in for me...my own head is out to stop me sleeping... Ye Gods and little fishes, I've actually died in the line of duty! That was too much for Jenny Lewis, so why am I still here? Am I a masochist?"

"Don't be like that!" Asuka said, in the most matriarchal voice the simulator could muster. Dave's response was to turn off the light again and turn to face the wall. He heard his Pokemon sigh, felt the bed move, and a weight settle across his shins.

He sighed himself, as the Luxray's body heat warmed his legs. "Sorry...Thanks, Mousey."

A yellow eye opened in response. "Don't call me that." But Asuka smiled slightly none-the-less as she watched him drift off.

_Please don't make me kill you again..._ She silently pleaded, her tears dripping onto the bedclothes, as she drifted off into troubled dreams herself. _Your pride will do that anyway if you're not careful..._

_

* * *

_

And there we have it! How many of you were expecting that, I wonder?

Little continuity note: Dave's pun-making tendencies are going to be temporarily suspended for a while after this, and Asuka is pobably going to be accompanying him around the library for the forseeable future. I'll update the Wiki appropriately as soon as I can.

Thanks for bearing with me everyone. I hope you enjoyed reading this as much as I enjoyed writing it, and as you can see there's more to come. It will help this imensely if you reviewed this offering. Thank you all!


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